Watchmen fic: Imperative
Title: Imperative
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore. I am filthy fanfic-writing scum.
Rating: R.
Word count: 9158.
Warnings: Contains violence, implied child abuse, animal cruelty (it's the Roche case, natch), and general bigoted assholery (Rorschach is a dick).
Summary: 'The worst thing, though, is the sudden expression of hope and gratitude on Mrs. Roche's face.'
We do not do this thing because it is permitted.
===
You can tell that the Roches are good people by the way that they treat their children.
Blair isn't their only daughter; they have another, Susan, 8, and a son, David, 9. Mrs. Roche is a dedicated housewife, Mr. Roche has a kind face. You find yourself being invited in to their small apartment, and you're too polite to refuse.
The children's paintings have been put up on the kitchen walls, and the room is clean, with the faint scent of coffee and cooking - proper cooking, not the greasy smell that you usually associate with kitchens. It's a tidy little den of blue-collar normalcy, one of the closest things to the American dream that you can hope to see during your lifetime. You feel as if you are the only thing that is out of place. It's families like this that make you believe, more than ever, that being poor isn't an excuse for being morally weak. See, says the kitchen, these people don't have much money, but they make the best of it. And they are poor. There's no point in trying to sugarcoat it. If they weren't poor, then they wouldn't be living in such a bad neighbourhood. It's possible that they are the only white family in their apartment building.
A geriatric spaniel lies on a blanket in one corner. The dog eyes you distrustfully, but you can imagine the children taking it to one of the city's nicer parks for a game of fetch, as normal children should do.
You sit down at the kitchen table. The Roches are scared of you - you can tell by the rapid movement of their eyes and their quick, stiff gestures - but their guardedness and formality makes you respect them more. They don't like you, but they're willing to endure their unease for the sake of their daughter.
Blair has been missing for almost two weeks, and it shows on the faces of her parents. Mrs. Roche grips her husband's hand and doesn't look at you as she speaks.
The three of you discuss things. You ask the usual questions: Blair's last known location, what she was wearing on the day of her disappearance, the route that she had likely taken prior to her abduction. She went missing on a Monday - she had attended school as usual, but did not come home. (Blair had her name written on her lunchbox. It seems likely that her abductor was an opportunist.) It was during the next day that the Roches received the ransom phonecall. The phonecall instructed them to leave a plain bag of cash at the address of an abandoned house; the caller did not give a deadline. The Roches say that police have the house under observation, in the hope that the abductor will return there.
"Obviously, the police are doing all they can," says Mr. Roche, "But..." Mr. and Mrs. Roche know of your reputation for getting results. You're not a crank. They are glad of your intervention.
In a moment of hubris, you find yourself promising to return Blair unharmed.
The words leave your mouth before your brain can intercept them. You then immediately regret what you've said. You know what bad people do to children. Still, perhaps there is some hope; the choice of target and confusion over the family name suggests that you're dealing with a kidnapper who isn't terribly bright or imaginative. Your reputation isn't without merit, and you're not hindered by red tape. It is important to maintain a high sense of morale when undertaking a new endeavor.
You can not retract what you have said.
The worst thing, though, is the sudden expression of hope and gratitude on Mrs. Roche's face.
===
You would ask for Daniel Dreiberg's help, but he is in Massachusetts. While it would be unfair to resent him for this, you have to acknowledge that Daniel always did have a rather poor sense of timing.
So, you are on your own. At work, you ask to take some holiday leave, but your boss isn't willing to let you go at such short notice. You could lie to him and claim that you have to attend to an urgent family matter, but deceit makes your skin crawl.
You'll manage. Most of your business is conducted at night, and you can spend the daylight hours thinking and planning ahead as you work. The biggest risk is that you will not be left with enough free time for adequate sleep, but you know that you are fairly resilient, and exhaustion can be endured. You cannot tolerate the thought of letting the kidnapping remain unsolved for longer than a month.
When it gets dark, you don your uniform.
You can already feel a growing sense of unease that threatens to erode your confidence. Non-family abductions rarely end well. You would assume that the police would make a special effort to locate an innocent girl, but Blair has been missing for two weeks, and two weeks feels like a very long time. Perhaps the case has been pushed to the wayside by needless bureaucratic procedure, or hindered due to budget cuts; you know how easy it is for the system to fail the citizens that it is meant to protect. Or perhaps the lack of publicity is a factor. The kidnapping has not received as much in the way of media attention as you would have expected.
You wonder how far the police have got with the case. No doubt, they would have canvassed the area. They would have interviewed delivery personnel. They would have tapped and tracked the Roche's incoming calls. They would have searched the Roche's home, too.
It would help if you could see the police's existing records on the case.
The Owl's Nest has its own computer with access to the NYPD, FBI, and Interpol databases. You have no contacts in law enforcement, but Daniel is friends with Hollis Mason, who still knows a few cops. Perhaps he will have access to the NYPD's rumor mill.
Grudgingly, you visit Mason first.
Mason is wary. He does not invite you in. You tell him of your need for information, and he makes no promises. However, the Roche case clearly upsets him, and you get the impression that he will at least try to help in some way, because he is a good man. He is a good man, and he does not like you. You leave Mason, and head to the Owl's Nest.
You doubt that Daniel will mind it if you use his computer, and you intend to keep an eye on his house while he is away. The basement always smells faintly of aviation fuel and damp. It's well-ventilated, but you have an excellent sense of smell, even with a mask over your face. You'd recognise the place even if you were blindfolded.
The computer sits in one corner, a hulking, ugly thing that whirs loudly and stinks of burning dust when switched on. Its hardware boxes are taller than you are. You approach it with some trepidation; you think that you know how to use it, having observed Daniel plenty of times, but the machine can be unreliable. Temperamental, even. Which is ridiculous. It's an inanimate object. (It doesn't help when you catch Daniel talking to it, sometimes.)
You run a quick search, and soon locate the file for Blair Roche in the missing persons database. It tells you little that you do not already know, and you are forced to look at her photograph again. She's a round-faced little girl, with a shy smile and rather large, dark eyes. She looks happy, well-adjusted, and trusting. (You doubt that she looks so trusting any more.) Further searching produces a list of people with previous convictions who live or work in the areas close to her home, school, and the drop-off point that the kidnapper mentioned in the phonecall. The printer chitters noisily as it spews out paper bearing their names and addresses. When that is done, you set up the computer to run a few more searches - you want to read up on reports of attempted abductions with case similarities - but it should take several hours for the search to be completed.
In the mean time, you decide to go bar-hopping.
In many cases of kidnapping and murder, it is often human error or a fluke of chance that gives the perpetrator away. Holmesian deduction skills are not always required, but a detective still needs to be tenacious, patient, and observant. It is likely that Blair's kidnapper has already made a slew of mistakes, and it is likely that someone, somewhere, knows something. While the computer searches, you intend to find things out the old-fashioned way.
===
The first man's name is Mike Keller. He has a history of armed robbery, he lives barely a mile from where Blair went missing, and his index finger sounds like a snapped twig.
People seem to expect this sort of thing from you. It's a performance, but it's not one that you dislike giving. The bar is almost empty, but there are still a few nighthawks around to watch you. They're a sad, gray-faced lot, clutching their cheap drinks with white fingers. They look horrified, yet they never glance away.
It makes you wonder how far you could go before they'd glance away in disgust. Pretty far, you'd reckon. Further still, before someone would be willing to step in and try to stop you.
Mike Keller cries and pleads and says that he doesn't know anything about a little girl. You believe he's telling the truth, but you have to be sure.
You hate the staring, fish-like eyes of your audience, so for your next trick, you twist the man's thumb until it dislocates. He shrieks like a child, making your stomach twist in revulsion, and you're sorely tempted to repeat the process with his other thumb. It would serve very little purpose - all it would do is cause him to make more noise, which you hate so badly - but the urge is still there; it itches at the back of your mind. You can feel it under the skin of your forearms, making your hands tense. It's like the temptation to scratch a scab, or the desire to probe a broken tooth with your tongue.
"Oh Jesus fuck," says Mike Keller. "I don't know anything about the kid." He is telling the truth. You can always tell. The dislocated thumb was quite unnecessary. You let him go.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't hurt people in order to obtain information; the information provided by people under duress is rarely reliable or consistent. Instead, you hurt people because you have a reputation to maintain. It makes intimidation so much easier, so you are spared from having to resort to mind-games and lies.
You exit the bar. The rest of your night is uneventful, but you will always remember how you were watched by every eye in the room.
===
You catch three hours sleep.
The next day, on your way to work, you almost get hit by a cab as you try to cross the road at a stoplight. The driver leans out the window to curse at you in Spanish. A slew of potential replies (all of them involving the word 'wetback') spring to mind, but you do not respond, because you are polite. You make a mental note to check the road more carefully the next time you try to cross. Tiredness lends a grey cast to everything. Things will look better after you've had some coffee.
Work goes by quickly. Your colleagues leave you alone. You try to plan ahead, but the inspiration does not come. You take a nap during your lunch break. It's a warm day and you should really be outside, but you prefer to remain indoors, despite the erratic noise of the sewing machines. Most of your co-workers like to go outside simply to get away from the dusty air and the dry smell of cloth, but you find it strangely relaxing, even if the cotton fibres make your eyes itch. The half-hour seems far too short, and then it's back to the grindstone again. You watch the clock until it's time to leave.
===
Six hours later, and you're back in the familiar world of nocturnal Brooklyn. It's not long before you find two youths kicking a drunk in an alleyway, and you make short work of them. One of the youths flee, leaving his 'friend' lying on the floor in a broken heap. You know he's still alive, because he's breathing bloody bubbles out of his nose. You're not a murderer.
The drunk is curled up against the wall; slowly, he unfolds himself, and looks up at you. He stinks of his own excrement and an odd, rotting smell, as if his body is already starting to decay. You've seen ragpickers like him before; they're nothing more than heaps of bones and tattered cloth, and you wonder why they seem to hang on for as long as they do. Once, you saw one, barely alive, whose skin seemed to be sloughing off his hands - dry gangrene, probably - and you actually wanted to kill him, knowing that there would be a little less ugliness in the world for it. The drunk stares at you with crusted eyes, and it makes you wonder how people can allow themselves to get like that.
Then you realise that he's not only looking at you with fear, but with revulsion.
The irony would make you smile. You have no intention of harming him, but he doesn't know that. You leave him, with the unconscious body of his attacker for company.
===
The next person you visit is Smithy Collins, who has a record for dealing in heroin. You don't hurt him. Instead, you pin him down and hold the point of a boxcutter a few millimeters away from his eye, and that is enough. He tells you a few interesting things, but nothing about the Roche case.
While Daniel would no doubt criticize you for wasting time on individual criminals, there is a method to your madness. Criminals associate with other criminals. They form a perverse fraternity, a little sub-society where their vices are tolerated. They're all connected, they're all in it together, whether they're aware of it or not. The whores know who the dealers are, and the dealers know who the junkies are, and the junkies know who the thieves are (it helps that the thieves and the junkies are usually the same individuals). You doubt that Blair's kidnapper is a first-time offender. Adult felons are likely to have been juvenile delinquents with prior records.
There are a few more people who you intend to ask before the night is over, and then you will pay another visit to Mason.
===
Mason has nothing to tell you, except for the fact that he does not appreciate being woken up at 1 o'clock in the morning. Eventually, you go off-duty and return to your apartment. Some kind soul has vomited in the stairwell, and you make a mental note to punch the next junkie you meet.
Your apartment is a mess. It is so dirty that you are struck by how unfamiliar it seems. It wasn't always like that. You intend to clean it when you are less busy. It's impossible to get rid of the roaches completely, but it's easier to deal with them when the floor is clear.
Actually, you can tolerate the roaches - it's just the mice that you can't stand. When you were young, she - that is, the woman who was your mother - made you collect the traps because she was too squeamish to do it herself (the hypocrisy of this is not lost on you), and you used to hate finding the pathetic little creatures with their necks broken. Now, you've become remarkably adept at killing them with an old chair leg that you keep to hand. One of your boxing instructors said that you had the best reflexes he'd ever seen. (You used to live downstairs from a crazy old guy who'd pick off the mice with a BB gun, but you don't think you'd go quite that far.) Your mice-killing prowess would make a good party trick for one of those charity balls that Ozymandias likes to organise. (Daniel gave up years ago on trying to convince you to go to one. God knows what Ozymandias would do if you attended one of his social gatherings. Would probably hide the silverware.)
Anyway. You make a mental note to clean your apartment, and file it away at the back of your mind.
There's a huge map of the city on your apartment wall. It's an ancient, tattered, multi-colored thing, covered with thumbtacks and your own chickenscratch handwriting. After some hesitation, you pull some of the thumbtacks out to make some space, and re-assign them to denote the homes and workplaces of known offenders who you believe are relevant to the Roche case. You stare at the map for a while, hands on hips, until you lose your ability to concentrate.
You should sleep, but you don't feel tired any more. If you try to sleep, you know that you're going to end up staring at the ceiling as your own mind gnaws on itself. So, you sit on your bed, and pick up one of your journals.
You've been keeping a journal since '53, after one of your teachers recommended it. Since then, you have amassed a sizeable collection of them. They are too numerous to fit on the bookshelf, so they have been stacked by your bed, in chronological order.
Ever since '64, there have been two stacks: one smaller stack of journals for things relating to crimefighting, and one larger stack of journals for things that relating to your more mundane life. You would never re-read the latter stack - old journal entries tend to be deeply embarrassing - but you like having them there, because your memory is not infallible, and there is always the off-chance that your asinine personal observations may come in useful one day. It could happen. It's an infinite universe, after all. And you like the idea that, were you to die tomorrow, a small part of you would still exist, held safely between those pages. (Granted, you wouldn't want anyone to actually read them, but just knowing that they exist is enough.)
You like the routine of sitting down every night and focusing solely on writing. Seeing your thoughts in writing crystallises them somehow, renders them down in to orderly sentences. A journal is a little patch of rationality where you can make sense of the world. When you were younger, you would get so engrossed in your schoolwork that you would forget where you were, and writing in your journals is a little like that.
You write until your eyelids get too heavy to stay open.
===
You are in a familiar place. It is pitch black and you can't see. You stumble around until you find a light switch. As soon as you switch it on, you see that the room is full of moths, darting around the bare lightbulb that hangs from the ceiling. You open your mouth to shout for someone, but one of the moths flies in - it is dusty and foul-tasting, like a twitching piece of old, dirty paper, and it sticks in your throat so that you can't breathe. You cough, but you can hear other people's voices outside the room you're in, and you're suddenly afraid that they'll hear you. If they hear you choking, they'll force your jaw open and stick their hands down your throat to pull the moth out, while telling you that it is for your own good. Then you wake up.
===
You've slept for about two hours. You don't feel like sleeping any more.
And your asshole hippy neighbour has decided that 4 AM is a suitable time to play loud music. You're not going to do anything about it, because it was a disagreement with one of your neighbours that got you evicted from your last apartment. You lie in bed for a while, and try to make out the words - Did you hear about the midnight rambler? Everybody got to go - until you lose interest, and unthinkingly begin the daily routine of getting ready for work.
While in the bathroom (you are presently staying in an apartment that has its own, rather than a communal one) you look in the mirror, resisting the urge to grimace, and try to smooth down a ridiculous curl of hair that insists on sticking out. You need a haircut. You make another mental note; another thing that you will do once the Roche case is resolved. If you squint and ignore the stubble, you like a damn fourteen year old. A fourteen year old with an eighty year old's eyes. You scratch at your face and look around for a razor that's still sharp.
You've been using safety razors ever since you saw one of the Underboss's thugs use a straight razor to cut a man's carotid artery. You know how irrational this is.
You're not a coward. Violence does not bother you. You're more concerned by the way that you find yourself looking at ordinary household objects and imagining the ways that they could be used to hurt people. The ability to see impromptu weapons everywhere has saved your life a couple of times, but you're not particularly grateful for it when, say, you're in the middle of trying to shave, or eating breakfast, or cutting fabric. It is so ridiculous that you should find it funny, but you are not laughing.
You leave early, and spend your spare time retracing the steps that Blair took on her way home from school. The streets are empty, and you can conduct your walk unobserved. You know how the local parents and schoolchildren would perceive you if they saw you loitering in the area, especially in the wake of Blair's abduction.
Daniel is actually quite good with kids. You are never quite sure how to speak to them. They are difficult to figure out. Rationally, you know that you were young once, but that is about the extent of it. By the age of seven, you already felt as if you were a small adult. You do not remember your childhood very well.
You end up sitting near a small boy on the subway to work, and he seems to watch you out the corner of his eye. There's something in his expression that reminds you of Hollis Mason. You ignore the kid, and close your eyes, although the journey isn't long enough for you to sleep. Later, you take a nap during your lunch break, and one of your co-workers has to shake your shoulder to wake you up. It's a small miracle that you don't hit him for it, and when he leaves you alone again, you're surprised to find that your hands are shaking slightly. You feel fine, apart from the fact that you're a little tired, and the shaking soon passes. It's just odd, because you've always had such steady hands.
After work, you know that you'll call it an early night.
You visit Mason again - at a more sociable hour, this time - and he has managed to talk to some of his old buddies. According to him, the police have set up a command post for the investigation at a local church, and they think that one of their best leads is in the eyewitness reports of a dilapidated truck seen hanging around the area at the time Blair went missing. Eyewitnesses agree that the truck was a Chevy. No-one mentions seeing Blair actually get in to the truck, but a weak lead is better than no lead at all.
You have formed a portrait of the abductor in your head. Likely male, likely unmarried, likely from low socio-economic background, likely has poor social skills, but is manipulative enough to kidnap a child without causing a disturbance. You want to picture him as some sort of monster, but the reality is always far more banal. Perhaps he has the sort of face that children find easy to trust. It's the adults who look trustworthy who are often the most dangerous.
(Especially when you're just a child, and it's your word against theirs, and you think that no-one will believe you.)
You keep thinking of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Two months passed before the baby was located, quite by accident - by then, it was nothing more than a decaying corpse, partially eaten by scavengers. With non-family abduction-homicides, the child is often killed within hours of being taken.
Why did you promise Mrs. Roche that you'd bring her daughter back unharmed?
Part of your brain refuses to acknowledge how unrealistic the promise was. You still want to make good on it.
You have to keep an open mind. It is unwise to form preliminary opinions about the outcome of a case, because they may cause you to overlook certain details.
When you leave Mason, you take the long way back home, walking via one of your patrol routes. It's uneventful, although you do encounter two black youths in the process of vandalising a wall. You don't seem to interact with blacks much unless they're committing a crime. You get on fine with Howard, one of your co-workers, but he's the exception that proves the rule. If Howard can be a good, law-abiding Christian, then why can't all the other blacks do that? You chase the teenagers off. You're faster than they are, and it would be tempting to catch up with them, but you can hear Daniel's voice in your head telling you to go easy on them because they're just kids. You find the sentiment risible. If they're old enough to be legally employed, then they're old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. That's the problem with liberals. They think that everyone is just a product of their environment, which is a huge disservice to the personal agency of the individual. People don't have to be victims of their circumstances. Ultimately, the decision to choose good or evil is up to you and you alone.
Still, you let the teenagers escape. You have more important things to worry about.
You manage to get seven hours sleep.
You still feel tired.
===
The next day, you go to visit Salvadore Garza, a sex offender who lives a few blocks away from Blair's school. Like the others, he says he doesn't know anything, and you believe that he's telling the truth, but you still hurt him a bit and shatter every bone in both of his hands. You leave him on the floor of his house, curled up in a foetal position and cradling his useless fingers - a thin string of blood and saliva connects his mouth to the floor, and the bruises around his eyesockets rapidly darken. You know that soon, his face will be so discolored and swollen that he will be unrecognisable.
Fortunately, you manage to get away before the police arrive. His neighbours must have overheard you and called them. You chide yourself for being sloppy.
===
Another week passes. You explore the areas around Blair's home, her school, and the location mentioned in the ransom note. You re-trace her route home from school at the time of day her abduction was believed to have occurred. You keep asking questions of the underworld. Still nothing. The days blur in to each other.
You prevent a mugging and put a would-be carjacker in hospital, and once, that might have been enough for you, but dealing with petty criminals no longer feels productive. There's no satisfaction in your work.
You break in to the police's command post for the investigation, and use one of Daniel's cameras to photograph the reports, details of possible suspects, and transcripted interviews, so that you can read them later at your leisure. A couple of years ago, you wouldn't have dared to go near a command post, but your past successes have made you bold. The police already have plenty of reasons to hate you; why not give them a few more? Besides, you need all the information you can get, and it feels as if it is worth the risk.
You use the Owl's Nest as a base. You cover one of its walls with paper - maps, print-outs, photographs of suspects. You take a roll of paper from the printer and spread it out on the floor, so that you can use it to create a timeline of the case.
Your sleeping is still inconsistent. It's very odd, because when you were younger, you used to work back-to-back shifts and go for days without sleeping properly, and you were fine. Granted, the Roche case bothers you - but that's to be expected, isn't it? Of course it bothers you. It has been twenty five days since she went missing. It is difficult to remain unaffected by such things - and perhaps that is a good thing, because it shows that you are not as apathetic and dead to the world as most people are. Many New Yorkers would have read about the Roche case in the newspaper, but what did they do about it? They would have felt a vicarious bit of sadness and fear, then turned the page and pushed the matter from their minds, reasoning that missing children are somebody else's problem. Everything is always somebody else's problem.
You are surrounded by lotus eaters, growing fat on the corpse of a once-great country.
Everything makes you angry.
On Friday night, you unwind by finding Robert Jackson, a coke dealer, and throwing him down two flights of stairs. It transpires that he doesn't know anything about Blair Roche either, but that's beside the point.
===
You're aware of a ringing noise, and it slowly dawns on you that it's your alarm clock. It takes a moment for to you open your eyes, because your eyelids seem to be stuck together. It's 6 am. You need to be in work by 8. If you leave your apartment at 7.30, you'll still be able to get there on time, and it only takes you 10 minutes to get ready. So, you can probably get away with lying in until 7.20. You shut your eyes again - you'll just rest for a bit.
When you wake up again, it's 10.15.
You throw some clothes on and rush to the nearest pay phone. Someone has rigged it so that the money gets stuck in the slot - it's an old trick, the culprit will likely return later to collect the unused coins by poking them out with a piece of wire - so you have to run to the next nearest payphone, which fortunately remains unmolested. You phone your boss. He's annoyed. You don't particularly care, but you apologise profusely all the same. You have no excuse for being late, and he does not appreciate your honesty. He tells you to come in to work, regardless, so you do.
On the way over, an elderly woman launches an angry diatribe at a bemused-looking teenager for eating a foul-smelling hamburger on the subway train. Such a lot of vitriol over such a stupid thing. You'd probably find it mildly amusing under different circumstances.
You're not without a sense of humor (no, really, it's true) - you're just not sure where it's been for the last few years.
Sitting on the train gives you time to indulge in pointless introspection. Even before the Roche case began, things have seemed slightly... 'off', somehow. You can't quite isolate a particular reason for this. Maybe it's because of New York's high crime rate. Maybe it's the poor economic climate. Maybe it's because people have finally realised that the optimism of the 60s was sorely misplaced. Maybe it's because everyone knows that society is going to the dogs, dragged down by the perverts and hedonists who seem to have crawled out of the woodwork over the last twenty years. Whatever it is, it seems to have affected everyone around you; you can see something cold and uncertain in people's eyes, and their fake smiles can't hide it. The Great Society was a bad joke.
Daniel has been especially short-tempered, which is probably one of the reasons why he's slunk off to Massachusetts for a while. You don't actually miss his help. During the past year, he seems to have picked up the habit of asking personal questions. You don't need that.
...You're not quite sure why you're being so maudlin.
It would help if you could occupy your mind with something better. You remember when you used to spend hours planning takedowns, plotting the arrests of felons, looking for patterns in human behaviour that you can exploit, weaknesses in other people's strategy. But the Roche case just seems so random and arbitrary. The family have no enemies, from what you've learned - they have no acquaintances or relatives who might have taken Blair. You have checked. There are no vendettas or conspiracies, just a compete stranger who decided to kidnap a little girl one afternoon. Sometimes things don't need elaborate reasons. Human cruelty is its own excuse.
Work drags by. One of your colleagues asks if you're going deaf, because they've been calling your name for about five minutes and you haven't been responding. You're quite sure that your hearing is fine; if anything, things seem as if they're too loud.
===
Mason leaves a letter at one of your drop-boxes. An elderly couple have reported seeing a child who fits Blair's description at an apartment complex in New Lots. The police have sealed off the building, and are searching any vehicles that wish to leave. Mason also spends a good few paragraphs chewing you out for the 'command post thing'. The police are willing to go easy on you for some of your activities - no-one's going to shed any tears for the scumbags you beat up - but if they even think that you've been on their turf again (and yes, they know it was you, because it seemed like 'just the sort of stunt you'd pull'), they're going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.
You smile, despite yourself. You wonder how they'd react if they knew that Daniel already had access to their databases.
The letter is the last contact that you have with Mason.
===
Whenever you go past a shop, you venture inside to read the newspapers for sale; you check them religiously for any developments regarding the last possible sighting of Blair, but there's nothing, other than the occasional article on the ongoing investigation. Still, at least the recent sighting means there's a chance that she still might be alive; the police seem to have taken it very seriously, and the case has returned to the attention of the media.
Over the next few days, you continue to patrol the streets as normal. You do not stop asking questions. (You suspect that you've put thirteen people in hospital. You keep count of such things.) You get in to fights. You win most of them. The ones that you do not win, you manage to escape from with little more than cuts and bruises. Violence is oddly soothing, because it is straightforward and familiar.
You come across Jasmin, a twelve year old female who's been selling herself at one of the bus stops for the past year or so. You know she's twelve years old, because she looks it, and she'd already admitted as much to Daniel (when she'd finished mocking his costume) during a previous encounter. For God's sake, you don't know how to deal with Jasmin. (As Daniel once put it, jokingly: 'You can't fight her, because if you win, congrats, you've just won a fight against a twelve year old girl. If you lose, congrats, you've just lost a fight against a twelve year old girl.') Normally, you would give her a wide berth, but Blair's disappearance makes you think twice. Eventually, you get her to move on, if only because you scare her customers away. Daniel used to keep an eye on her and bring her a cup of coffee now and then, but you do not want to encourage her. She smokes constantly and her language is terrible. You wonder where her mother is. Some people should not be allowed to breed.
In your darker moments, you wonder why a girl like Blair is taken, while a girl like Jasmin remains unharmed. If there is a God, then He is arbitrary. Then you remind yourself that girls like Jasmin do get taken. The difference is that no-one cares. Some people are best forgotten.
Poverty is adept at making so many things invisible.
All the more reason to try and rise above it.
It's too late for you, though. You look around at the tenements and tower blocks - and perversely, you feel at home.
===
You wake up, yawn, fix breakfast, skulk around your apartment for a while - and it's when you're brushing your teeth that your dreams come back to you:
You're being dragged. You try to fight it, but your limbs are just dead weigh - your body feels heavy, and you exist as a little spark of consciousness trapped inside your own skull. You recognise the feeling as concussion. There's a hand around your wrist, and that brings back another memory, of a hand on the back of your neck.
You push the dreams from your mind, but you still find yourself glancing down at your own hands. Rough palms, bony knuckles, long fingers (one of them is slightly crooked, having been broken and not set properly - it's been like that since before you can remember). Pale, blind creatures, segmented and clever; they're no different to any other man's hands. They're the most evil part of the human body, after the brain and before the mouth. You've broken hands like these many times before; you know how much pressure you'd have to apply to make the bones snap, and you know how much it would hurt. People seem to be especially squeamish about damage to their hands. Their hands and their eyes.
You don't know how long you stand there, but when you finally snap out of it and glance to the clock, you see that you're going to be late for work.
===
It's a beautiful day, and you find yourself squinting whenever you're outside.
During the walk from the subway to your workplace, you walk past the huge glass windows of department stores that you'll never go in, and you're careful to avoid looking at your own reflection.
When it is your break, you distract yourself by picking up an abandoned newspaper. They say that there has been another sighting of Blair. Not in New Lots, this time - this time, it's even closer to where you live. You are familiar with the area. You want it to mean something. You want to make good on your promise to Mr. and Mrs. Roche. If you find Blair alive, it will be like an absolution.
(If you can't find Blair alive, it will make you a liar.)
In light of that, you are convinced that Blair is still alive. Somebody knows something.
===
You pay a visit to Richard Gibbs, a small-time pimp. He only lives a few streets down from you. How fortunate.
The apartment block where he lives is still busy after dark, and it always makes you wonder, don't these people ever sleep? Regardless, you manage to enter the building without incident. There is little need for stealth. Most people know who you are, and they avoid you. They don't want trouble. They have enough of that in their lives as it is.
The apartment block is a surprisingly clean building, and you have one of those cheap, insidious moments where you're faced with a petty criminal who lives in better conditions than you do. Outside Gibbs' apartment is an abandoned child's tricycle, and it gives you pause; does Gibbs have children? No doubt he has a few girlfriends around the city, with kids who may or may not be his. The thought of a person having a family is supposed to make them seem more likeable and human, but with Gibbs, it has the opposite effect.
He has an expensive lock on his door, but you pick it anyway.
Inside, the apartment has that burnt grassy smell of marijuana. You can hear noises coming from the area where the kitchen is - the apartment has a layout that's very similar to yours - and you find Gibbs with his back to the door, in the middle of frying some food. He doesn't know you're there until it's too late for him.
In one movement, you're rushing at him and twisting his arm in a wristlock. The frying pan clatters to the floor and Gibbs yells as the hot grease splashes over his feet. The more he struggles, the more he hurts himself. He's a big man, but you know how to make it work against him.
"Mr. Gibbs," you say, "I'm looking for Blair Roche. You'll have seen her photograph in the newspaper."
He stops struggling, because he has the sense to realise that he's in danger of tearing the ligaments in his arm. "Why you asking me?"
"A few years ago, you dealt with Arnold Harris. Harris had very specialised interests."
"Look, you know I had nothing to do with that. You've seen my girls, they're all okay. Harris died in jail two years ago, man," says Gibbs, through gritted teeth.
"Was wondering who else you dealt with. Who else had specialised interests."
"Look, no-one, alright? Besides, I know that girl, that's the missing one, no-one would be dumb enough to do anything with her, no-one professional, you're asking the wrong people. You think she's been sold on or something? Shit, no-one would take the risk, she's probably dead by now, she..."
You apply your weight between his shoulder blades, so that he's forced to lean forwards. His face ends up centimeters from one of the hot plates on the cooker.
"Don't kill me," Gibbs says.
"Wouldn't necessarily kill you, Gibbs," you reply. "You know people."
"I don't-..."
You force his head down until he starts screaming and you can smell charred flesh, and then you let him stand half-upright.
"Alex Wilson, you crazy little fuck!" he shouts. "Go ask Alex Wilson, not me!" You know Alex Wilson. The only reason why you haven't spoken to him yet is because you considered him to be low priority. Alex Wilson is just a numbers runner.
"Why?" You give his head a gentle nudge back towards the hot plate again.
"I was in the bookies the other day and I saw him there and there was TV above the counter and a news item about the kid came on and he just sort of stared at it real funny and shit, that's all I've got, I don't know, what else do you want from me?"
He's not lying. Something in your gut tells you that this is one of the better leads you've heard during the past few days, and you ease your grip on Gibbs. Stupid mistake.
You wouldn't have thought he was capable of moving so quickly; he manages to wrestle one hand free, and snatches out to grab a knife from the draining board by the kitchen sink. You're already moving away from him, trying to get out of his reach, but you're not as fast as you think you are. Underhand, he stabs at your abdomen - he still has his back to you - and misses, embedding the knife in your thigh. It's a lot like being punched.
There's very little pain - you know from experience that the pain will come later - but the anticipation of pain makes the seconds stretch out to an eternity. Unreality sets in.
He twists the knife before pulling it out. You immediately knock the knife out of his hand, as if it something unclean.
The part of your brain that is always observant and detached notes that the knife is only a small thing, a peeling knife. Completely ridculous.
Time speeds up again, turns itself inside-out. You feel as if you are controlling your body from afar.
You're not quite sure what happens next.
Apart from the dim realisation that you've just been stabbed with a kitchen implement, you're not entirely aware of your actions. It's only after you pause and see that Gibbs is lying on the floor, bleeding from his ears and mouth, that you realise you've just beat him unconscious.
You're aware of your clothes becoming wet and sticking to your skin. It feels cold, as if the heat is leeching out of you.
You pick up the stupid little knife, and limp out of the apartment.
Outside, it starts to rain. It's during the walk back that your leg starts to hurt. It's a steady ache; at first, it's like a stubbed toe, or a finger that has been slammed in a door. This is just the onset. It will get worse. You're not sure how severe the wound is yet. There really is a lot of blood, and it makes you wonder if he managed to get your femoral artery. It occurs to you that you may die from blood loss. When you were a teenager, you would fantasize about living in a nice neighbourhood, with a good job, and leaving these dark streets behind. Now, as an adult, you wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Then you tell yourself to stop being so melodramatic. It's the shock talking, not you. It does things to your mind. You find your thoughts becoming circular and unpleasant. You try to negotiate with the monologue in your head, telling it to shut up, you're fine, but you're the passenger of your own brain. Then you start to worry again, because you once read that anxiety is a symptom of severe hypovolemic shock, and loss of one third of the body's blood volume can be enough to kill a person. You're not just being neurotic.
When you get home, you put a pair of plastic bags over your hands, and press on the wound with the cleanest towel that you can find. You place a pillow under your leg to keep it elevated.
At some point, you fall unconscious. It's not quite the same as sleep.
===
When you wake up (evidently, Gibbs didn't hit a femoral artery), you have a headache. The first thing you do is limp over to the kitchen sink and drink water until you feel ill. Afterwards, you put some proper dressing on your leg. You only leave your apartment to find a pay phone and call in sick at work. You spend the rest of the day in bed. You sit on the stain of your own dried blood from the previous night. There is nowhere else to sit, because your apartment is such a mess.
You open one of your journals and stare at a blank page. All of a sudden, you can't think of anything to say. You feel betrayed.
You don't have time to sit around and rest. Every so often, you stand up, and try to walk around - but each time you move, your leg aches as if someone has hammered a rusty nail in to the bone.
You realise that it will be impossible to investigate the Roche case while attending work and nursing an injury.
The next day, you tell your boss that you're quitting your job, and afterwards, you can't remember what he said. He doesn't even ask for a month's notice.
As you're (temporarily) unemployed, it means that you have more spare time to get some sleep.
But you can't.
===
You like the way that your mask makes you feel enclosed. The world takes on a grainier texture, turning slightly darker whenever the black ink swirls over your eyes. If you focus on that, you can ignore a lot of things. You visit Alex Wilson as soon as possible. You find him in his home. He gives you an address. The address is for an abandoned dress shop. The abandoned dress shop is used by a man named Gerald Grice. Grice is Wilson's brother-in-law. Wilson's wife is present as you question him, but you do not care about her. She doesn't say or do anything, she just cries. Afterwards, the name and address are the only things you can remember from the encounter, although you notice that your injury is bleeding again.
As you walk away from Wilson's home, you can hear ambulance sirens in the background, and you know that they are for him.
===
During the walk to the address that Wilson has given you, you notice a beat-up Chevy truck parked by the curb. Your heart-rate increases, but you fight off the growing sense of hope and urgency. Hope is a very cruel thing, and you do not trust it. It is better to be cold and clear-headed. You can see the dress shop up ahead. You do not run.
The shop looks empty, but you can hear dogs barking. You peer through the fence that encloses the overgrown, shit-stinking yard that's next to the building. Two German Shepherds are fighting over a scrap of meat and bone. You check the premises - it doesn not look as if the dogs have any way of getting inside the shop. You should be quite safe.
You go in through the front door, just as a customer might have, once. The lock only requires brute force.
You find yourself standing in a filthy hallway.
You start with the first room to your left. It is empty, except for the lumpy female shapes of dress forms, and a stove, and a gasoline can.
The stove door is closed, so you open it, removing your left glove to reach inside to rake through the ash. There's something in there, a chunk of something light and brittle - your fingers brush against it, then close around what feels like a scrap of fabric. You pull the scrap out so that you can see it in the fading light, and see that the cloth is was once pink; quite obviously taken from a child's garment.
You're sure that Blair is somewhere in the building.
You can return to the stove and make a more thorough investigation later - right now, your main priority is to keep searching. The greasy ash sticks to your fingers, and you unthinkingly wipe your hand on your coat before replacing your glove.
It's so quiet; strangely, you'd give anything to hear a child crying. Your imagination seems to function independently of your wishes, and you find yourself picturing Blair sitting silently in a closet, hugging her knees, locked in the darkness for what always felt like an eternity.
You go to check the other downstairs rooms, and it's then that you catch sight of a silhouette loitering by a window at the end of the hallway.
It's just another dress form. You realise your mistake in a matter of seconds, but it takes longer for the feeling of unease to pass. The limbless female torsos want to trick your brain in to thinking that they are people - and when you catch sight of them out the corner of your eye, it's almost believable, no matter how wrong they look, with their missing heads, and their pelvises impaled by metal stands.
There's a kitchen, dusty and covered in cobwebs. The cupboards seem to be empty, until you open one and find a set of butcher's implements. They gleam, even in the fading light, and they are are the only clean things in the filthy kitchen. You take the cleaver out and notice the faint notches on the edge of the blade, which is the same length as the marks on the chopping board.
Outside, the two dogs snarl over a bone. You find yourself watching them.
You haven't looked upstairs yet. Blair could still be up there.
You know what type of bone it that the dogs are fighting over. It's a femur. It is straight and thin, and you pause to think.
Something (like a hand on the back of your neck) holds you there and forces you to watch the dogs.
You make yourself realize.
You think of Blair's parents, and of a funeral without a body. The weight of the cleaver in your hand is the only thing anchoring you to reality - and you're struck by the belief that, were you to let go of the cleaver's handle, something terrible would happen.
You know what you must do. If you do not do it, no-one else will.
Leave the kitchen, and go outside in to the yard.
The dogs look up as you step in to their territory. They are meant to be guard dogs, but they lack the temperament. Their animal eyes do not comprehend. As you near them, one of the dogs goes to sniff your hand - the hand that you used to search through the stove, a few minutes earlier; the ash is still under your fingernails.
Bring the cleaver down on his head. Feel the jarring impact as you hit through bone - it's like chopping wood - and yank the cleaver free as the dog sags to the ground.
Repeat the action with the other dog. You won't kill it immediately. It staggers back, head split open, and makes a noise that sounds like the cry of no earthly creature. One eye lolls out against its cheek. Remember it, what an awful thing that is, to see a wet eyeball chafe against dry, dirty fur. Bring the cleaver down again and again until the dog is silent.
Then stand there, still clinging to the handle of the cleaver, which is now slippery. Wait for Grice.
The bodies twitch, not yet entirely dead despite the destruction of their brains. The inside of the nearest dog's head gleams wetly in the streetlamps; a sticky-damp cleft. If you touched it, it would feel warm and soft, like the inside of a mouth.
Close your eyes.
===
Someone else returns to your apartment, takes all the old journals, takes them outside, and burns them.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore. I am filthy fanfic-writing scum.
Rating: R.
Word count: 9158.
Warnings: Contains violence, implied child abuse, animal cruelty (it's the Roche case, natch), and general bigoted assholery (Rorschach is a dick).
Summary: 'The worst thing, though, is the sudden expression of hope and gratitude on Mrs. Roche's face.'
We do not do this thing because it is permitted.
===
You can tell that the Roches are good people by the way that they treat their children.
Blair isn't their only daughter; they have another, Susan, 8, and a son, David, 9. Mrs. Roche is a dedicated housewife, Mr. Roche has a kind face. You find yourself being invited in to their small apartment, and you're too polite to refuse.
The children's paintings have been put up on the kitchen walls, and the room is clean, with the faint scent of coffee and cooking - proper cooking, not the greasy smell that you usually associate with kitchens. It's a tidy little den of blue-collar normalcy, one of the closest things to the American dream that you can hope to see during your lifetime. You feel as if you are the only thing that is out of place. It's families like this that make you believe, more than ever, that being poor isn't an excuse for being morally weak. See, says the kitchen, these people don't have much money, but they make the best of it. And they are poor. There's no point in trying to sugarcoat it. If they weren't poor, then they wouldn't be living in such a bad neighbourhood. It's possible that they are the only white family in their apartment building.
A geriatric spaniel lies on a blanket in one corner. The dog eyes you distrustfully, but you can imagine the children taking it to one of the city's nicer parks for a game of fetch, as normal children should do.
You sit down at the kitchen table. The Roches are scared of you - you can tell by the rapid movement of their eyes and their quick, stiff gestures - but their guardedness and formality makes you respect them more. They don't like you, but they're willing to endure their unease for the sake of their daughter.
Blair has been missing for almost two weeks, and it shows on the faces of her parents. Mrs. Roche grips her husband's hand and doesn't look at you as she speaks.
The three of you discuss things. You ask the usual questions: Blair's last known location, what she was wearing on the day of her disappearance, the route that she had likely taken prior to her abduction. She went missing on a Monday - she had attended school as usual, but did not come home. (Blair had her name written on her lunchbox. It seems likely that her abductor was an opportunist.) It was during the next day that the Roches received the ransom phonecall. The phonecall instructed them to leave a plain bag of cash at the address of an abandoned house; the caller did not give a deadline. The Roches say that police have the house under observation, in the hope that the abductor will return there.
"Obviously, the police are doing all they can," says Mr. Roche, "But..." Mr. and Mrs. Roche know of your reputation for getting results. You're not a crank. They are glad of your intervention.
In a moment of hubris, you find yourself promising to return Blair unharmed.
The words leave your mouth before your brain can intercept them. You then immediately regret what you've said. You know what bad people do to children. Still, perhaps there is some hope; the choice of target and confusion over the family name suggests that you're dealing with a kidnapper who isn't terribly bright or imaginative. Your reputation isn't without merit, and you're not hindered by red tape. It is important to maintain a high sense of morale when undertaking a new endeavor.
You can not retract what you have said.
The worst thing, though, is the sudden expression of hope and gratitude on Mrs. Roche's face.
===
You would ask for Daniel Dreiberg's help, but he is in Massachusetts. While it would be unfair to resent him for this, you have to acknowledge that Daniel always did have a rather poor sense of timing.
So, you are on your own. At work, you ask to take some holiday leave, but your boss isn't willing to let you go at such short notice. You could lie to him and claim that you have to attend to an urgent family matter, but deceit makes your skin crawl.
You'll manage. Most of your business is conducted at night, and you can spend the daylight hours thinking and planning ahead as you work. The biggest risk is that you will not be left with enough free time for adequate sleep, but you know that you are fairly resilient, and exhaustion can be endured. You cannot tolerate the thought of letting the kidnapping remain unsolved for longer than a month.
When it gets dark, you don your uniform.
You can already feel a growing sense of unease that threatens to erode your confidence. Non-family abductions rarely end well. You would assume that the police would make a special effort to locate an innocent girl, but Blair has been missing for two weeks, and two weeks feels like a very long time. Perhaps the case has been pushed to the wayside by needless bureaucratic procedure, or hindered due to budget cuts; you know how easy it is for the system to fail the citizens that it is meant to protect. Or perhaps the lack of publicity is a factor. The kidnapping has not received as much in the way of media attention as you would have expected.
You wonder how far the police have got with the case. No doubt, they would have canvassed the area. They would have interviewed delivery personnel. They would have tapped and tracked the Roche's incoming calls. They would have searched the Roche's home, too.
It would help if you could see the police's existing records on the case.
The Owl's Nest has its own computer with access to the NYPD, FBI, and Interpol databases. You have no contacts in law enforcement, but Daniel is friends with Hollis Mason, who still knows a few cops. Perhaps he will have access to the NYPD's rumor mill.
Grudgingly, you visit Mason first.
Mason is wary. He does not invite you in. You tell him of your need for information, and he makes no promises. However, the Roche case clearly upsets him, and you get the impression that he will at least try to help in some way, because he is a good man. He is a good man, and he does not like you. You leave Mason, and head to the Owl's Nest.
You doubt that Daniel will mind it if you use his computer, and you intend to keep an eye on his house while he is away. The basement always smells faintly of aviation fuel and damp. It's well-ventilated, but you have an excellent sense of smell, even with a mask over your face. You'd recognise the place even if you were blindfolded.
The computer sits in one corner, a hulking, ugly thing that whirs loudly and stinks of burning dust when switched on. Its hardware boxes are taller than you are. You approach it with some trepidation; you think that you know how to use it, having observed Daniel plenty of times, but the machine can be unreliable. Temperamental, even. Which is ridiculous. It's an inanimate object. (It doesn't help when you catch Daniel talking to it, sometimes.)
You run a quick search, and soon locate the file for Blair Roche in the missing persons database. It tells you little that you do not already know, and you are forced to look at her photograph again. She's a round-faced little girl, with a shy smile and rather large, dark eyes. She looks happy, well-adjusted, and trusting. (You doubt that she looks so trusting any more.) Further searching produces a list of people with previous convictions who live or work in the areas close to her home, school, and the drop-off point that the kidnapper mentioned in the phonecall. The printer chitters noisily as it spews out paper bearing their names and addresses. When that is done, you set up the computer to run a few more searches - you want to read up on reports of attempted abductions with case similarities - but it should take several hours for the search to be completed.
In the mean time, you decide to go bar-hopping.
In many cases of kidnapping and murder, it is often human error or a fluke of chance that gives the perpetrator away. Holmesian deduction skills are not always required, but a detective still needs to be tenacious, patient, and observant. It is likely that Blair's kidnapper has already made a slew of mistakes, and it is likely that someone, somewhere, knows something. While the computer searches, you intend to find things out the old-fashioned way.
===
The first man's name is Mike Keller. He has a history of armed robbery, he lives barely a mile from where Blair went missing, and his index finger sounds like a snapped twig.
People seem to expect this sort of thing from you. It's a performance, but it's not one that you dislike giving. The bar is almost empty, but there are still a few nighthawks around to watch you. They're a sad, gray-faced lot, clutching their cheap drinks with white fingers. They look horrified, yet they never glance away.
It makes you wonder how far you could go before they'd glance away in disgust. Pretty far, you'd reckon. Further still, before someone would be willing to step in and try to stop you.
Mike Keller cries and pleads and says that he doesn't know anything about a little girl. You believe he's telling the truth, but you have to be sure.
You hate the staring, fish-like eyes of your audience, so for your next trick, you twist the man's thumb until it dislocates. He shrieks like a child, making your stomach twist in revulsion, and you're sorely tempted to repeat the process with his other thumb. It would serve very little purpose - all it would do is cause him to make more noise, which you hate so badly - but the urge is still there; it itches at the back of your mind. You can feel it under the skin of your forearms, making your hands tense. It's like the temptation to scratch a scab, or the desire to probe a broken tooth with your tongue.
"Oh Jesus fuck," says Mike Keller. "I don't know anything about the kid." He is telling the truth. You can always tell. The dislocated thumb was quite unnecessary. You let him go.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't hurt people in order to obtain information; the information provided by people under duress is rarely reliable or consistent. Instead, you hurt people because you have a reputation to maintain. It makes intimidation so much easier, so you are spared from having to resort to mind-games and lies.
You exit the bar. The rest of your night is uneventful, but you will always remember how you were watched by every eye in the room.
===
You catch three hours sleep.
The next day, on your way to work, you almost get hit by a cab as you try to cross the road at a stoplight. The driver leans out the window to curse at you in Spanish. A slew of potential replies (all of them involving the word 'wetback') spring to mind, but you do not respond, because you are polite. You make a mental note to check the road more carefully the next time you try to cross. Tiredness lends a grey cast to everything. Things will look better after you've had some coffee.
Work goes by quickly. Your colleagues leave you alone. You try to plan ahead, but the inspiration does not come. You take a nap during your lunch break. It's a warm day and you should really be outside, but you prefer to remain indoors, despite the erratic noise of the sewing machines. Most of your co-workers like to go outside simply to get away from the dusty air and the dry smell of cloth, but you find it strangely relaxing, even if the cotton fibres make your eyes itch. The half-hour seems far too short, and then it's back to the grindstone again. You watch the clock until it's time to leave.
===
Six hours later, and you're back in the familiar world of nocturnal Brooklyn. It's not long before you find two youths kicking a drunk in an alleyway, and you make short work of them. One of the youths flee, leaving his 'friend' lying on the floor in a broken heap. You know he's still alive, because he's breathing bloody bubbles out of his nose. You're not a murderer.
The drunk is curled up against the wall; slowly, he unfolds himself, and looks up at you. He stinks of his own excrement and an odd, rotting smell, as if his body is already starting to decay. You've seen ragpickers like him before; they're nothing more than heaps of bones and tattered cloth, and you wonder why they seem to hang on for as long as they do. Once, you saw one, barely alive, whose skin seemed to be sloughing off his hands - dry gangrene, probably - and you actually wanted to kill him, knowing that there would be a little less ugliness in the world for it. The drunk stares at you with crusted eyes, and it makes you wonder how people can allow themselves to get like that.
Then you realise that he's not only looking at you with fear, but with revulsion.
The irony would make you smile. You have no intention of harming him, but he doesn't know that. You leave him, with the unconscious body of his attacker for company.
===
The next person you visit is Smithy Collins, who has a record for dealing in heroin. You don't hurt him. Instead, you pin him down and hold the point of a boxcutter a few millimeters away from his eye, and that is enough. He tells you a few interesting things, but nothing about the Roche case.
While Daniel would no doubt criticize you for wasting time on individual criminals, there is a method to your madness. Criminals associate with other criminals. They form a perverse fraternity, a little sub-society where their vices are tolerated. They're all connected, they're all in it together, whether they're aware of it or not. The whores know who the dealers are, and the dealers know who the junkies are, and the junkies know who the thieves are (it helps that the thieves and the junkies are usually the same individuals). You doubt that Blair's kidnapper is a first-time offender. Adult felons are likely to have been juvenile delinquents with prior records.
There are a few more people who you intend to ask before the night is over, and then you will pay another visit to Mason.
===
Mason has nothing to tell you, except for the fact that he does not appreciate being woken up at 1 o'clock in the morning. Eventually, you go off-duty and return to your apartment. Some kind soul has vomited in the stairwell, and you make a mental note to punch the next junkie you meet.
Your apartment is a mess. It is so dirty that you are struck by how unfamiliar it seems. It wasn't always like that. You intend to clean it when you are less busy. It's impossible to get rid of the roaches completely, but it's easier to deal with them when the floor is clear.
Actually, you can tolerate the roaches - it's just the mice that you can't stand. When you were young, she - that is, the woman who was your mother - made you collect the traps because she was too squeamish to do it herself (the hypocrisy of this is not lost on you), and you used to hate finding the pathetic little creatures with their necks broken. Now, you've become remarkably adept at killing them with an old chair leg that you keep to hand. One of your boxing instructors said that you had the best reflexes he'd ever seen. (You used to live downstairs from a crazy old guy who'd pick off the mice with a BB gun, but you don't think you'd go quite that far.) Your mice-killing prowess would make a good party trick for one of those charity balls that Ozymandias likes to organise. (Daniel gave up years ago on trying to convince you to go to one. God knows what Ozymandias would do if you attended one of his social gatherings. Would probably hide the silverware.)
Anyway. You make a mental note to clean your apartment, and file it away at the back of your mind.
There's a huge map of the city on your apartment wall. It's an ancient, tattered, multi-colored thing, covered with thumbtacks and your own chickenscratch handwriting. After some hesitation, you pull some of the thumbtacks out to make some space, and re-assign them to denote the homes and workplaces of known offenders who you believe are relevant to the Roche case. You stare at the map for a while, hands on hips, until you lose your ability to concentrate.
You should sleep, but you don't feel tired any more. If you try to sleep, you know that you're going to end up staring at the ceiling as your own mind gnaws on itself. So, you sit on your bed, and pick up one of your journals.
You've been keeping a journal since '53, after one of your teachers recommended it. Since then, you have amassed a sizeable collection of them. They are too numerous to fit on the bookshelf, so they have been stacked by your bed, in chronological order.
Ever since '64, there have been two stacks: one smaller stack of journals for things relating to crimefighting, and one larger stack of journals for things that relating to your more mundane life. You would never re-read the latter stack - old journal entries tend to be deeply embarrassing - but you like having them there, because your memory is not infallible, and there is always the off-chance that your asinine personal observations may come in useful one day. It could happen. It's an infinite universe, after all. And you like the idea that, were you to die tomorrow, a small part of you would still exist, held safely between those pages. (Granted, you wouldn't want anyone to actually read them, but just knowing that they exist is enough.)
You like the routine of sitting down every night and focusing solely on writing. Seeing your thoughts in writing crystallises them somehow, renders them down in to orderly sentences. A journal is a little patch of rationality where you can make sense of the world. When you were younger, you would get so engrossed in your schoolwork that you would forget where you were, and writing in your journals is a little like that.
You write until your eyelids get too heavy to stay open.
===
You are in a familiar place. It is pitch black and you can't see. You stumble around until you find a light switch. As soon as you switch it on, you see that the room is full of moths, darting around the bare lightbulb that hangs from the ceiling. You open your mouth to shout for someone, but one of the moths flies in - it is dusty and foul-tasting, like a twitching piece of old, dirty paper, and it sticks in your throat so that you can't breathe. You cough, but you can hear other people's voices outside the room you're in, and you're suddenly afraid that they'll hear you. If they hear you choking, they'll force your jaw open and stick their hands down your throat to pull the moth out, while telling you that it is for your own good. Then you wake up.
===
You've slept for about two hours. You don't feel like sleeping any more.
And your asshole hippy neighbour has decided that 4 AM is a suitable time to play loud music. You're not going to do anything about it, because it was a disagreement with one of your neighbours that got you evicted from your last apartment. You lie in bed for a while, and try to make out the words - Did you hear about the midnight rambler? Everybody got to go - until you lose interest, and unthinkingly begin the daily routine of getting ready for work.
While in the bathroom (you are presently staying in an apartment that has its own, rather than a communal one) you look in the mirror, resisting the urge to grimace, and try to smooth down a ridiculous curl of hair that insists on sticking out. You need a haircut. You make another mental note; another thing that you will do once the Roche case is resolved. If you squint and ignore the stubble, you like a damn fourteen year old. A fourteen year old with an eighty year old's eyes. You scratch at your face and look around for a razor that's still sharp.
You've been using safety razors ever since you saw one of the Underboss's thugs use a straight razor to cut a man's carotid artery. You know how irrational this is.
You're not a coward. Violence does not bother you. You're more concerned by the way that you find yourself looking at ordinary household objects and imagining the ways that they could be used to hurt people. The ability to see impromptu weapons everywhere has saved your life a couple of times, but you're not particularly grateful for it when, say, you're in the middle of trying to shave, or eating breakfast, or cutting fabric. It is so ridiculous that you should find it funny, but you are not laughing.
You leave early, and spend your spare time retracing the steps that Blair took on her way home from school. The streets are empty, and you can conduct your walk unobserved. You know how the local parents and schoolchildren would perceive you if they saw you loitering in the area, especially in the wake of Blair's abduction.
Daniel is actually quite good with kids. You are never quite sure how to speak to them. They are difficult to figure out. Rationally, you know that you were young once, but that is about the extent of it. By the age of seven, you already felt as if you were a small adult. You do not remember your childhood very well.
You end up sitting near a small boy on the subway to work, and he seems to watch you out the corner of his eye. There's something in his expression that reminds you of Hollis Mason. You ignore the kid, and close your eyes, although the journey isn't long enough for you to sleep. Later, you take a nap during your lunch break, and one of your co-workers has to shake your shoulder to wake you up. It's a small miracle that you don't hit him for it, and when he leaves you alone again, you're surprised to find that your hands are shaking slightly. You feel fine, apart from the fact that you're a little tired, and the shaking soon passes. It's just odd, because you've always had such steady hands.
After work, you know that you'll call it an early night.
You visit Mason again - at a more sociable hour, this time - and he has managed to talk to some of his old buddies. According to him, the police have set up a command post for the investigation at a local church, and they think that one of their best leads is in the eyewitness reports of a dilapidated truck seen hanging around the area at the time Blair went missing. Eyewitnesses agree that the truck was a Chevy. No-one mentions seeing Blair actually get in to the truck, but a weak lead is better than no lead at all.
You have formed a portrait of the abductor in your head. Likely male, likely unmarried, likely from low socio-economic background, likely has poor social skills, but is manipulative enough to kidnap a child without causing a disturbance. You want to picture him as some sort of monster, but the reality is always far more banal. Perhaps he has the sort of face that children find easy to trust. It's the adults who look trustworthy who are often the most dangerous.
(Especially when you're just a child, and it's your word against theirs, and you think that no-one will believe you.)
You keep thinking of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Two months passed before the baby was located, quite by accident - by then, it was nothing more than a decaying corpse, partially eaten by scavengers. With non-family abduction-homicides, the child is often killed within hours of being taken.
Why did you promise Mrs. Roche that you'd bring her daughter back unharmed?
Part of your brain refuses to acknowledge how unrealistic the promise was. You still want to make good on it.
You have to keep an open mind. It is unwise to form preliminary opinions about the outcome of a case, because they may cause you to overlook certain details.
When you leave Mason, you take the long way back home, walking via one of your patrol routes. It's uneventful, although you do encounter two black youths in the process of vandalising a wall. You don't seem to interact with blacks much unless they're committing a crime. You get on fine with Howard, one of your co-workers, but he's the exception that proves the rule. If Howard can be a good, law-abiding Christian, then why can't all the other blacks do that? You chase the teenagers off. You're faster than they are, and it would be tempting to catch up with them, but you can hear Daniel's voice in your head telling you to go easy on them because they're just kids. You find the sentiment risible. If they're old enough to be legally employed, then they're old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. That's the problem with liberals. They think that everyone is just a product of their environment, which is a huge disservice to the personal agency of the individual. People don't have to be victims of their circumstances. Ultimately, the decision to choose good or evil is up to you and you alone.
Still, you let the teenagers escape. You have more important things to worry about.
You manage to get seven hours sleep.
You still feel tired.
===
The next day, you go to visit Salvadore Garza, a sex offender who lives a few blocks away from Blair's school. Like the others, he says he doesn't know anything, and you believe that he's telling the truth, but you still hurt him a bit and shatter every bone in both of his hands. You leave him on the floor of his house, curled up in a foetal position and cradling his useless fingers - a thin string of blood and saliva connects his mouth to the floor, and the bruises around his eyesockets rapidly darken. You know that soon, his face will be so discolored and swollen that he will be unrecognisable.
Fortunately, you manage to get away before the police arrive. His neighbours must have overheard you and called them. You chide yourself for being sloppy.
===
Another week passes. You explore the areas around Blair's home, her school, and the location mentioned in the ransom note. You re-trace her route home from school at the time of day her abduction was believed to have occurred. You keep asking questions of the underworld. Still nothing. The days blur in to each other.
You prevent a mugging and put a would-be carjacker in hospital, and once, that might have been enough for you, but dealing with petty criminals no longer feels productive. There's no satisfaction in your work.
You break in to the police's command post for the investigation, and use one of Daniel's cameras to photograph the reports, details of possible suspects, and transcripted interviews, so that you can read them later at your leisure. A couple of years ago, you wouldn't have dared to go near a command post, but your past successes have made you bold. The police already have plenty of reasons to hate you; why not give them a few more? Besides, you need all the information you can get, and it feels as if it is worth the risk.
You use the Owl's Nest as a base. You cover one of its walls with paper - maps, print-outs, photographs of suspects. You take a roll of paper from the printer and spread it out on the floor, so that you can use it to create a timeline of the case.
Your sleeping is still inconsistent. It's very odd, because when you were younger, you used to work back-to-back shifts and go for days without sleeping properly, and you were fine. Granted, the Roche case bothers you - but that's to be expected, isn't it? Of course it bothers you. It has been twenty five days since she went missing. It is difficult to remain unaffected by such things - and perhaps that is a good thing, because it shows that you are not as apathetic and dead to the world as most people are. Many New Yorkers would have read about the Roche case in the newspaper, but what did they do about it? They would have felt a vicarious bit of sadness and fear, then turned the page and pushed the matter from their minds, reasoning that missing children are somebody else's problem. Everything is always somebody else's problem.
You are surrounded by lotus eaters, growing fat on the corpse of a once-great country.
Everything makes you angry.
On Friday night, you unwind by finding Robert Jackson, a coke dealer, and throwing him down two flights of stairs. It transpires that he doesn't know anything about Blair Roche either, but that's beside the point.
===
You're aware of a ringing noise, and it slowly dawns on you that it's your alarm clock. It takes a moment for to you open your eyes, because your eyelids seem to be stuck together. It's 6 am. You need to be in work by 8. If you leave your apartment at 7.30, you'll still be able to get there on time, and it only takes you 10 minutes to get ready. So, you can probably get away with lying in until 7.20. You shut your eyes again - you'll just rest for a bit.
When you wake up again, it's 10.15.
You throw some clothes on and rush to the nearest pay phone. Someone has rigged it so that the money gets stuck in the slot - it's an old trick, the culprit will likely return later to collect the unused coins by poking them out with a piece of wire - so you have to run to the next nearest payphone, which fortunately remains unmolested. You phone your boss. He's annoyed. You don't particularly care, but you apologise profusely all the same. You have no excuse for being late, and he does not appreciate your honesty. He tells you to come in to work, regardless, so you do.
On the way over, an elderly woman launches an angry diatribe at a bemused-looking teenager for eating a foul-smelling hamburger on the subway train. Such a lot of vitriol over such a stupid thing. You'd probably find it mildly amusing under different circumstances.
You're not without a sense of humor (no, really, it's true) - you're just not sure where it's been for the last few years.
Sitting on the train gives you time to indulge in pointless introspection. Even before the Roche case began, things have seemed slightly... 'off', somehow. You can't quite isolate a particular reason for this. Maybe it's because of New York's high crime rate. Maybe it's the poor economic climate. Maybe it's because people have finally realised that the optimism of the 60s was sorely misplaced. Maybe it's because everyone knows that society is going to the dogs, dragged down by the perverts and hedonists who seem to have crawled out of the woodwork over the last twenty years. Whatever it is, it seems to have affected everyone around you; you can see something cold and uncertain in people's eyes, and their fake smiles can't hide it. The Great Society was a bad joke.
Daniel has been especially short-tempered, which is probably one of the reasons why he's slunk off to Massachusetts for a while. You don't actually miss his help. During the past year, he seems to have picked up the habit of asking personal questions. You don't need that.
...You're not quite sure why you're being so maudlin.
It would help if you could occupy your mind with something better. You remember when you used to spend hours planning takedowns, plotting the arrests of felons, looking for patterns in human behaviour that you can exploit, weaknesses in other people's strategy. But the Roche case just seems so random and arbitrary. The family have no enemies, from what you've learned - they have no acquaintances or relatives who might have taken Blair. You have checked. There are no vendettas or conspiracies, just a compete stranger who decided to kidnap a little girl one afternoon. Sometimes things don't need elaborate reasons. Human cruelty is its own excuse.
Work drags by. One of your colleagues asks if you're going deaf, because they've been calling your name for about five minutes and you haven't been responding. You're quite sure that your hearing is fine; if anything, things seem as if they're too loud.
===
Mason leaves a letter at one of your drop-boxes. An elderly couple have reported seeing a child who fits Blair's description at an apartment complex in New Lots. The police have sealed off the building, and are searching any vehicles that wish to leave. Mason also spends a good few paragraphs chewing you out for the 'command post thing'. The police are willing to go easy on you for some of your activities - no-one's going to shed any tears for the scumbags you beat up - but if they even think that you've been on their turf again (and yes, they know it was you, because it seemed like 'just the sort of stunt you'd pull'), they're going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.
You smile, despite yourself. You wonder how they'd react if they knew that Daniel already had access to their databases.
The letter is the last contact that you have with Mason.
===
Whenever you go past a shop, you venture inside to read the newspapers for sale; you check them religiously for any developments regarding the last possible sighting of Blair, but there's nothing, other than the occasional article on the ongoing investigation. Still, at least the recent sighting means there's a chance that she still might be alive; the police seem to have taken it very seriously, and the case has returned to the attention of the media.
Over the next few days, you continue to patrol the streets as normal. You do not stop asking questions. (You suspect that you've put thirteen people in hospital. You keep count of such things.) You get in to fights. You win most of them. The ones that you do not win, you manage to escape from with little more than cuts and bruises. Violence is oddly soothing, because it is straightforward and familiar.
You come across Jasmin, a twelve year old female who's been selling herself at one of the bus stops for the past year or so. You know she's twelve years old, because she looks it, and she'd already admitted as much to Daniel (when she'd finished mocking his costume) during a previous encounter. For God's sake, you don't know how to deal with Jasmin. (As Daniel once put it, jokingly: 'You can't fight her, because if you win, congrats, you've just won a fight against a twelve year old girl. If you lose, congrats, you've just lost a fight against a twelve year old girl.') Normally, you would give her a wide berth, but Blair's disappearance makes you think twice. Eventually, you get her to move on, if only because you scare her customers away. Daniel used to keep an eye on her and bring her a cup of coffee now and then, but you do not want to encourage her. She smokes constantly and her language is terrible. You wonder where her mother is. Some people should not be allowed to breed.
In your darker moments, you wonder why a girl like Blair is taken, while a girl like Jasmin remains unharmed. If there is a God, then He is arbitrary. Then you remind yourself that girls like Jasmin do get taken. The difference is that no-one cares. Some people are best forgotten.
Poverty is adept at making so many things invisible.
All the more reason to try and rise above it.
It's too late for you, though. You look around at the tenements and tower blocks - and perversely, you feel at home.
===
You wake up, yawn, fix breakfast, skulk around your apartment for a while - and it's when you're brushing your teeth that your dreams come back to you:
You're being dragged. You try to fight it, but your limbs are just dead weigh - your body feels heavy, and you exist as a little spark of consciousness trapped inside your own skull. You recognise the feeling as concussion. There's a hand around your wrist, and that brings back another memory, of a hand on the back of your neck.
You push the dreams from your mind, but you still find yourself glancing down at your own hands. Rough palms, bony knuckles, long fingers (one of them is slightly crooked, having been broken and not set properly - it's been like that since before you can remember). Pale, blind creatures, segmented and clever; they're no different to any other man's hands. They're the most evil part of the human body, after the brain and before the mouth. You've broken hands like these many times before; you know how much pressure you'd have to apply to make the bones snap, and you know how much it would hurt. People seem to be especially squeamish about damage to their hands. Their hands and their eyes.
You don't know how long you stand there, but when you finally snap out of it and glance to the clock, you see that you're going to be late for work.
===
It's a beautiful day, and you find yourself squinting whenever you're outside.
During the walk from the subway to your workplace, you walk past the huge glass windows of department stores that you'll never go in, and you're careful to avoid looking at your own reflection.
When it is your break, you distract yourself by picking up an abandoned newspaper. They say that there has been another sighting of Blair. Not in New Lots, this time - this time, it's even closer to where you live. You are familiar with the area. You want it to mean something. You want to make good on your promise to Mr. and Mrs. Roche. If you find Blair alive, it will be like an absolution.
(If you can't find Blair alive, it will make you a liar.)
In light of that, you are convinced that Blair is still alive. Somebody knows something.
===
You pay a visit to Richard Gibbs, a small-time pimp. He only lives a few streets down from you. How fortunate.
The apartment block where he lives is still busy after dark, and it always makes you wonder, don't these people ever sleep? Regardless, you manage to enter the building without incident. There is little need for stealth. Most people know who you are, and they avoid you. They don't want trouble. They have enough of that in their lives as it is.
The apartment block is a surprisingly clean building, and you have one of those cheap, insidious moments where you're faced with a petty criminal who lives in better conditions than you do. Outside Gibbs' apartment is an abandoned child's tricycle, and it gives you pause; does Gibbs have children? No doubt he has a few girlfriends around the city, with kids who may or may not be his. The thought of a person having a family is supposed to make them seem more likeable and human, but with Gibbs, it has the opposite effect.
He has an expensive lock on his door, but you pick it anyway.
Inside, the apartment has that burnt grassy smell of marijuana. You can hear noises coming from the area where the kitchen is - the apartment has a layout that's very similar to yours - and you find Gibbs with his back to the door, in the middle of frying some food. He doesn't know you're there until it's too late for him.
In one movement, you're rushing at him and twisting his arm in a wristlock. The frying pan clatters to the floor and Gibbs yells as the hot grease splashes over his feet. The more he struggles, the more he hurts himself. He's a big man, but you know how to make it work against him.
"Mr. Gibbs," you say, "I'm looking for Blair Roche. You'll have seen her photograph in the newspaper."
He stops struggling, because he has the sense to realise that he's in danger of tearing the ligaments in his arm. "Why you asking me?"
"A few years ago, you dealt with Arnold Harris. Harris had very specialised interests."
"Look, you know I had nothing to do with that. You've seen my girls, they're all okay. Harris died in jail two years ago, man," says Gibbs, through gritted teeth.
"Was wondering who else you dealt with. Who else had specialised interests."
"Look, no-one, alright? Besides, I know that girl, that's the missing one, no-one would be dumb enough to do anything with her, no-one professional, you're asking the wrong people. You think she's been sold on or something? Shit, no-one would take the risk, she's probably dead by now, she..."
You apply your weight between his shoulder blades, so that he's forced to lean forwards. His face ends up centimeters from one of the hot plates on the cooker.
"Don't kill me," Gibbs says.
"Wouldn't necessarily kill you, Gibbs," you reply. "You know people."
"I don't-..."
You force his head down until he starts screaming and you can smell charred flesh, and then you let him stand half-upright.
"Alex Wilson, you crazy little fuck!" he shouts. "Go ask Alex Wilson, not me!" You know Alex Wilson. The only reason why you haven't spoken to him yet is because you considered him to be low priority. Alex Wilson is just a numbers runner.
"Why?" You give his head a gentle nudge back towards the hot plate again.
"I was in the bookies the other day and I saw him there and there was TV above the counter and a news item about the kid came on and he just sort of stared at it real funny and shit, that's all I've got, I don't know, what else do you want from me?"
He's not lying. Something in your gut tells you that this is one of the better leads you've heard during the past few days, and you ease your grip on Gibbs. Stupid mistake.
You wouldn't have thought he was capable of moving so quickly; he manages to wrestle one hand free, and snatches out to grab a knife from the draining board by the kitchen sink. You're already moving away from him, trying to get out of his reach, but you're not as fast as you think you are. Underhand, he stabs at your abdomen - he still has his back to you - and misses, embedding the knife in your thigh. It's a lot like being punched.
There's very little pain - you know from experience that the pain will come later - but the anticipation of pain makes the seconds stretch out to an eternity. Unreality sets in.
He twists the knife before pulling it out. You immediately knock the knife out of his hand, as if it something unclean.
The part of your brain that is always observant and detached notes that the knife is only a small thing, a peeling knife. Completely ridculous.
Time speeds up again, turns itself inside-out. You feel as if you are controlling your body from afar.
You're not quite sure what happens next.
Apart from the dim realisation that you've just been stabbed with a kitchen implement, you're not entirely aware of your actions. It's only after you pause and see that Gibbs is lying on the floor, bleeding from his ears and mouth, that you realise you've just beat him unconscious.
You're aware of your clothes becoming wet and sticking to your skin. It feels cold, as if the heat is leeching out of you.
You pick up the stupid little knife, and limp out of the apartment.
Outside, it starts to rain. It's during the walk back that your leg starts to hurt. It's a steady ache; at first, it's like a stubbed toe, or a finger that has been slammed in a door. This is just the onset. It will get worse. You're not sure how severe the wound is yet. There really is a lot of blood, and it makes you wonder if he managed to get your femoral artery. It occurs to you that you may die from blood loss. When you were a teenager, you would fantasize about living in a nice neighbourhood, with a good job, and leaving these dark streets behind. Now, as an adult, you wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Then you tell yourself to stop being so melodramatic. It's the shock talking, not you. It does things to your mind. You find your thoughts becoming circular and unpleasant. You try to negotiate with the monologue in your head, telling it to shut up, you're fine, but you're the passenger of your own brain. Then you start to worry again, because you once read that anxiety is a symptom of severe hypovolemic shock, and loss of one third of the body's blood volume can be enough to kill a person. You're not just being neurotic.
When you get home, you put a pair of plastic bags over your hands, and press on the wound with the cleanest towel that you can find. You place a pillow under your leg to keep it elevated.
At some point, you fall unconscious. It's not quite the same as sleep.
===
When you wake up (evidently, Gibbs didn't hit a femoral artery), you have a headache. The first thing you do is limp over to the kitchen sink and drink water until you feel ill. Afterwards, you put some proper dressing on your leg. You only leave your apartment to find a pay phone and call in sick at work. You spend the rest of the day in bed. You sit on the stain of your own dried blood from the previous night. There is nowhere else to sit, because your apartment is such a mess.
You open one of your journals and stare at a blank page. All of a sudden, you can't think of anything to say. You feel betrayed.
You don't have time to sit around and rest. Every so often, you stand up, and try to walk around - but each time you move, your leg aches as if someone has hammered a rusty nail in to the bone.
You realise that it will be impossible to investigate the Roche case while attending work and nursing an injury.
The next day, you tell your boss that you're quitting your job, and afterwards, you can't remember what he said. He doesn't even ask for a month's notice.
As you're (temporarily) unemployed, it means that you have more spare time to get some sleep.
But you can't.
===
You like the way that your mask makes you feel enclosed. The world takes on a grainier texture, turning slightly darker whenever the black ink swirls over your eyes. If you focus on that, you can ignore a lot of things. You visit Alex Wilson as soon as possible. You find him in his home. He gives you an address. The address is for an abandoned dress shop. The abandoned dress shop is used by a man named Gerald Grice. Grice is Wilson's brother-in-law. Wilson's wife is present as you question him, but you do not care about her. She doesn't say or do anything, she just cries. Afterwards, the name and address are the only things you can remember from the encounter, although you notice that your injury is bleeding again.
As you walk away from Wilson's home, you can hear ambulance sirens in the background, and you know that they are for him.
===
During the walk to the address that Wilson has given you, you notice a beat-up Chevy truck parked by the curb. Your heart-rate increases, but you fight off the growing sense of hope and urgency. Hope is a very cruel thing, and you do not trust it. It is better to be cold and clear-headed. You can see the dress shop up ahead. You do not run.
The shop looks empty, but you can hear dogs barking. You peer through the fence that encloses the overgrown, shit-stinking yard that's next to the building. Two German Shepherds are fighting over a scrap of meat and bone. You check the premises - it doesn not look as if the dogs have any way of getting inside the shop. You should be quite safe.
You go in through the front door, just as a customer might have, once. The lock only requires brute force.
You find yourself standing in a filthy hallway.
You start with the first room to your left. It is empty, except for the lumpy female shapes of dress forms, and a stove, and a gasoline can.
The stove door is closed, so you open it, removing your left glove to reach inside to rake through the ash. There's something in there, a chunk of something light and brittle - your fingers brush against it, then close around what feels like a scrap of fabric. You pull the scrap out so that you can see it in the fading light, and see that the cloth is was once pink; quite obviously taken from a child's garment.
You're sure that Blair is somewhere in the building.
You can return to the stove and make a more thorough investigation later - right now, your main priority is to keep searching. The greasy ash sticks to your fingers, and you unthinkingly wipe your hand on your coat before replacing your glove.
It's so quiet; strangely, you'd give anything to hear a child crying. Your imagination seems to function independently of your wishes, and you find yourself picturing Blair sitting silently in a closet, hugging her knees, locked in the darkness for what always felt like an eternity.
You go to check the other downstairs rooms, and it's then that you catch sight of a silhouette loitering by a window at the end of the hallway.
It's just another dress form. You realise your mistake in a matter of seconds, but it takes longer for the feeling of unease to pass. The limbless female torsos want to trick your brain in to thinking that they are people - and when you catch sight of them out the corner of your eye, it's almost believable, no matter how wrong they look, with their missing heads, and their pelvises impaled by metal stands.
There's a kitchen, dusty and covered in cobwebs. The cupboards seem to be empty, until you open one and find a set of butcher's implements. They gleam, even in the fading light, and they are are the only clean things in the filthy kitchen. You take the cleaver out and notice the faint notches on the edge of the blade, which is the same length as the marks on the chopping board.
Outside, the two dogs snarl over a bone. You find yourself watching them.
You haven't looked upstairs yet. Blair could still be up there.
You know what type of bone it that the dogs are fighting over. It's a femur. It is straight and thin, and you pause to think.
Something (like a hand on the back of your neck) holds you there and forces you to watch the dogs.
You make yourself realize.
You think of Blair's parents, and of a funeral without a body. The weight of the cleaver in your hand is the only thing anchoring you to reality - and you're struck by the belief that, were you to let go of the cleaver's handle, something terrible would happen.
You know what you must do. If you do not do it, no-one else will.
Leave the kitchen, and go outside in to the yard.
The dogs look up as you step in to their territory. They are meant to be guard dogs, but they lack the temperament. Their animal eyes do not comprehend. As you near them, one of the dogs goes to sniff your hand - the hand that you used to search through the stove, a few minutes earlier; the ash is still under your fingernails.
Bring the cleaver down on his head. Feel the jarring impact as you hit through bone - it's like chopping wood - and yank the cleaver free as the dog sags to the ground.
Repeat the action with the other dog. You won't kill it immediately. It staggers back, head split open, and makes a noise that sounds like the cry of no earthly creature. One eye lolls out against its cheek. Remember it, what an awful thing that is, to see a wet eyeball chafe against dry, dirty fur. Bring the cleaver down again and again until the dog is silent.
Then stand there, still clinging to the handle of the cleaver, which is now slippery. Wait for Grice.
The bodies twitch, not yet entirely dead despite the destruction of their brains. The inside of the nearest dog's head gleams wetly in the streetlamps; a sticky-damp cleft. If you touched it, it would feel warm and soft, like the inside of a mouth.
Close your eyes.
===
Someone else returns to your apartment, takes all the old journals, takes them outside, and burns them.