The Killing Game

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE GODDAMN CAR!” the older cop yelled. Gregory exited his vehicle and stood with his hands at his side. The audience on the sidewalk started laughing as though this was a show they’d seen before. The older cop walked toward Gregory, the younger several steps behind. Gregory felt a rumble in his belly. For one strange and breathless second, the cops seemed to split into two pairs, one team walking left, the other walking right.

Behind him, someone said, “What happened next?” Gregory turned and saw only the giggling whores. When he turned back, the big cop had reappeared a foot from Gregory’s face. His uniform seemed to pulse and shimmer in the soft light, like it was woven from dreams.

“Breeeep,” the older cop said.

“What?” Gregory said, frowning.

Gregory felt a sharp poke in his side, looked down to see a shining black nightstick.

“Breathe, dammit. Like I just told you.”

Gregory heard gas bubbling in his intestines. A voice in his head said, Your guts are upset, Grigor; be careful. He exhaled. The cop stuck his nose in the outflow, made a big deal out of grimacing. The onlookers giggled. They had moved closer.

“His breath stinks, Mailey,” the cop grinned. “But I don’t smell booze.” He turned back to Gregory. “Only two reasons people come down here at night, mister. Drugs and pussy. Which one are you after?”

The whores giggled and chanted, “Pus-sy, pus-sy …” It was almost like they were singing. Gregory felt a trembling in his guts, moving lower. He heard squirting noises, bubbling.

“I’m not looking for a woman,” he lied, “and I don’t use drugs.”

“Pussy … pussy …”

The older cop grinned and waved the girls into silence. “Check inside his pretty car, Mailey.”

The young cop stepped close. His uniform was glowing in the light. “You don’t mind if I take a look inside your vehicle, do you, sir?”

Gregory was seething but forced a nonchalant shrug. The pressure in his belly was starting to hurt.

“Suit yourself, officer.”

The cop leaned into the car, patting beneath the seats, opening the glove box, pulling down the visors.

“Can I go now?” Gregory asked the older cop. His words seemed to come out half-sized and plaintive, like those of a frightened child.

“I say when you can go, sir,” the cop said, tapping Gregory’s shoulder with the black baton. “But I haven’t said that yet, have I? Check the back seat, Mailey.”

The young cop leaned into the rear, sliding his fingers between and underneath the cushions, reaching into the seatback pouches. He retreated holding a glossy magazine. Gregory felt his insides slosh and grind as the pain grew sharper.

“What is it, Mailey?” the old cop asked.

The cop named Mailey held up a page opened to a shot of a naked woman hanging upside down in chains, black clothespins clamped to her nipples and a red ball gag filling her mouth. Gregory stared in horror: How had he left the magazine in his car?

“It’s one of them pervert magazines, Horse,” the young cop said. “Something called Women in Agony.”

“Freak!” one of the women yelled, a gold incisor glinting.

The older cop pulled reading glasses from his pocket. “Lemme see.”

“I purchased that legally,” Gregory stammered, feeling a hot cascade through his intestines. He clenched his sphincter. “There’s … nothing wrong … with it.”

“You’re a freak!” the woman yelled again. The others took up the chant. “Freak, freak, freak …”

The young cop handed the magazine to the older one, who shook his head and tsk-ed through pages, reading glasses perched on the bulbous tip of his nose. “You like to tie ladies up, sir?” he asked in mocking sincerity. “Put those rubber balls in their mouths?”

The drunks joined in the chorus. “Freak, freak …” They were getting louder and louder. Gregory couldn’t answer the cop, his intestines were squirming like cut worms. He felt his control slipping away.

“You know, if you jam rubber balls in their mouths,” the cop grinned, “it doesn’t leave room for your dick.”

“Freak, freak …”

“I really … need to …”

“You need to shut the fuck up and stand still,” the cop said, tapping Gregory’s belly with the stick. He went back to turning pages and tsk-ing loudly.

What happened next?

Gregory felt his bowels explode, a hot flood filling his pants and sliding down his legs. The stink rose as the liquid fell. The cop stared at Gregory’s pants, his eyes following the stain to the pavement.

“Christ, Mailey,” the cop laughed, “the pervert just shit himself.”

The audience exploded into hoots and catcalls. Several onlookers began chanting Shit boy. One of the drunks started a rap in the middle of the street, grabbing at his crotch and pointing at Gregory. “Look at the boy with his face inna trance, got shit dripping down the legs of his pants …”

The cop named Horse didn’t seem to walk toward Gregory, but simply appeared in front of him like magic, a tower of threatening blue, his grin fierce and horrific. The cop put his huge callused hand over Gregory’s face and pushed him backward toward his car. He stumbled several steps before his legs tangled and he fell to the ground. When he tried to regain his legs, the cop’s big foot came down on Gregory’s chest and pushed him to the pavement, back into his own filth. The chorus of catcalls and laughter almost deafening, the big cop leaned over Gregory, grabbed his collar and jammed the magazine in the front of his shirt.

“You stink like a sewage factory, poopy,” the cop laughed as he stood and pulled his boot from Gregory’s chest. “Go home and learn how to use a toilet.”

What happened next?

Chapter 10

“You know, if you jam rubber balls in their mouths, it doesn’t leave room for your dick.”

Gregory screamed and kicked the pail of soapy water across the floor of his garage. It was useless to try and clean his car seat. The brown stain had not only set, it spread as he rubbed with the detergent solution.

“You stink like a sewage factory, poopy. Go home and learn how to use a toilet.”

Gregory had nearly crashed twice on his return, once driving through a stop sign, the second time almost missing a curve. His drive took him past Ema’s house and for some wild reason he pulled into her driveway, wanting to go to her door, make up an excuse, anything, anything.

Help me, Ema. I’m sick.

It was as if he saw himself walking her drive with his face contorted in misery, his body reeking of itself as his nails scratched in agony at her door. But no, that couldn’t have happened. Because when Ema’s lights came on at the sound of a car, Gregory had panicked, cutting the steering wheel and flooring the accelerator, whipping into a U-turn across Ema’s yard and back into the street, his heart wild in his throat.

What happened next?

Home minutes later, Gregory had torn off his clothes – designer khakis, linen shirt, silk socks, Italian walking shoes – jamming everything inside a garbage bag, and another and another, until a dozen bags surrounded the disgraced clothes. He’d showered until the water ran cold.

Gregory howled and kicked the pail again, sending it into a rack of rakes and brooms. They tumbled from the wall, clattering to the concrete.

I will kill them both, Gregory thought, kicking aside the implements as he paced inside the hot and reeking garage, hands wet with shit-stained water. Cut out their eyes. Slash their bellies and pack them with starving rats . . . nail their ballsacks to a tree and snip their carotids with pruning shears …

Harry and I were in early the next morning. I called Hernandez and filled him in on what we’d discovered. “Have you had any other instances of animal bodies lately?” I asked. “Tortured, I mean.”

“None. Same for the rest of the folks in the department. I’m not including neglect, a kind of torture, but …”

“Yeah. This was methodical and likely the highlight of this freak’s day.”

“Could you stake out the bridge?” Hernandez asked.

“We don’t have the manpower. And the pathologist is fairly certain the carcasses had been frozen. The perp probably froze the cats when he was, uh, finished with them. So he may well have driven across the bridge just the once.”

“Uh, listen, Detective Ryder … I did some reading on the Internet. I’m sure you know that people who torment animals can a lot of times turn into, uh …”

“Yep,” I said. “I know.”

I hung up and heard a throat being cleared. I turned to see a pretty young woman three paces back wearing a light summer dress with a backpack slung over a bare shoulder. “Hello, Miz Holliday,” I said. Harry turned, his eyes lighting as always when he saw a lovely woman.

“We’ve studied several of your cases, Detective Nautilus,” Holliday said after I’d made introductions. “Detective Ryder is always talking about you.”

Harry raised an eyebrow my way.

“It’s the other Harry Nautilus,” I said. “The pretty one.”

Harry shot me a strange grin and stood. “I’m gonna pull some uniforms to canvass the block below Bienville,” he said, referring to a current case.

“What brings you to HQ, Wendy?” I asked.

“Our class in police administration heard lectures from administrators. Departmental structure, chain of command, work flow, efficiency analysis, public outreach—”

“Did you manage to stay awake?”

“Let’s just say I’ll take one of your classes any day.”

“Very diplomatic. Chief Baggs … did he talk to the class?”

“We saw his office. His secretary said he was busy.”

I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes like a Las Vegas mentalist. “Something about the Mayor, right?” I divined.

“How did you know?”

I winked. “I’m a detective, Wendy. I detect. Where’s the rest of the class?”

“Dismissed a few minutes ago.”

“And up you snuck.”

“I was just going to peek through the door. Then I saw you and Detective Nautilus. And, uh, sort of kept walking.”

“Here’s the homicide floor. Peek away.”

She turned to look across the room, a full floor of cubicle offices. I almost avoided lowering my eyes past the knee-top hem for a mental photograph of the long, sun-browned legs, the slight front bow of her shins perfectly complementing the swell of calf.

“It seems kind of dark compared to the other floors,” she noted, turning my way as my head snapped up.

“Good catch,” I said, hoping she hadn’t caught me ogling. “When the building was put up, before my time, the latest in high-intensity ceiling lights were installed. Within two weeks the dicks had removed the fluorescent bulbs and brought in floor and desk lamps, creating an atmosphere better suited to solving mortal crimes.”

“Chiaroscuro,” Holliday said. “The juxtaposition of dark and light.”

“Nice vocabulary, Wendy.”

She blushed again and turned toward the door. “I guess I’ll see you in class, right?” she said over her shoulder.

“Looking forward to it,” I nodded, fighting to keep my eyes level.

Chapter 11

Gregory was sleeping when his cell rang from the bedside table. He tried to ignore it until his eyes caught the clock: 10.17 a.m. He never slept past eight … why did I …

The horrors of his night flooded into his head.

You fart while you screw, little ones that leak out.

The goddamn woman, the slut who’d insulted him. It was all her fault, making him need a whore, leading to getting stopped by the goddamn cops. Then the filth, shame, humiliation.

Step out of the car please …

The smell of shit was everywhere.

Officer—

… no not here no not now …

What happened after that?

GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE GODDAMN CAR.

My pants—

Officer, please, I can’t—

What happened next?

It’s one of them pervert magazines, Horse. Something called Women in Agony.

Gregory moaned. The phone rang a third time.

If you jam rubber balls in their mouths, it doesn’t leave room for your dick.

You stink like a sewage factory, poopy. Go home and learn how to use a toilet.

What happened next? What happened next?

The phone rang again. The answering machine came on. “Leave a number and I’ll get back to you.”

“Gregory?” a voice said, worried. “Gregory? Are you all right?”

Ema.

“Gregory? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. I’m so worried that you—”

He grabbed the phone. Pushed the thoughts of last night from his head. Ema was the current problem.

What happened next?

“I’m here, Ema. What the hell’s wrong now?”

A pause as his sister swallowed hard. She hated it when he cursed. “I’ve been … worried about you. We had breakfast scheduled for nine-thirty. I waited a half-hour and left.”

“Why didn’t you call from the restaurant?”

“I was afraid you might be ill. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I simply forgot to set my alarm, Ema. I’m fine.”

“You never oversleep.”

Gregory felt his guts cinch up. “I never tell you when I oversleep because you’ll fucking think I have sleeping sickness.”

“I couldn’t eat at the restaurant,” she said. “I just had coffee. Why don’t you come over and I’ll fix us a healthy breakfast.”

“I can’t, Ema. I have so much to do today and—”

“Grigor, you have to eat. And you know you won’t unless I—”

“It’s Gregory, Ema. G-r-e—”

“It pops out when I get worried. I’m sorry, Gregory. I worry about my little brother too much; it’s stupid.”

Christ, Gregory thought, Grigor. The fucking name was a dozen years gone, but poor addled Ema still used it several times a year.

“You’re not stupid, Ema, you have a big heart,” Gregory said, wishing she had a brain to match. He did a high-speed inventory of his systems, finding hunger: if he didn’t eat he’d get a headache. And if he didn’t see Ema this morning, she’d want to make up the missed meal tomorrow at one of her goddamn restaurants. If he ran over now he’d be free of her for days.

“Let me get dressed,” he said. “I don’t want a big breakfast, Ema. Toast and honey, right?”

He went to the garage. His car stank of shit. And the brown stains were soaked into the fabric of his seat. He went back in the house and called a cab.

Fifteen minutes later Gregory’s taxi was winding past brick and wood structures with large front windows and decorative plastic doors, Ema’s suburban housing complex.

Ema lived but two miles distant from Gregory. When he had received his inheritance, she had tried to get him to buy a home on her street, but he had shot that idea down immediately, knowing Ema would be visiting every day, plates of cookies or stuffed cabbage rolls in hand.

She was at the door as he arrived – probably watching for me since I hung up the phone – and he submitted to another crushing, smelly hug, her pendant pressing against his belly. But he endured, smiling through every second.

“Why did you come in a cab?” she asked. “You weren’t in a wreck, were you?”

“Just some mechanical problem.”

Ema’s living room was a warehouse of girly-type things overlaying the simple Colonial furniture; rag dolls on the couch, a throw pillow on a rocking chair, the words LOVE CHANGES EVERYTHING embroidered on its multicolored surface, a dozen kinds of cutesy magazines. There was a pink bookshelf of mysteries, biographies of Hollywood celebrities, and several running feet of true-life crime books. The television was on, though muted, Ema incapable of life without TV. She had a set in every room, an endless display of talent competitions, cop dramas, cooking programs and home-shopping options.

“I’m so happy you’re all right,” Ema said. “I was worried when you didn’t show.”

“You worry too much. I’m a grown-up.”

“I know. But it’s like I always told Dr Szekely: Even when Gregory’s fifty, he’ll still be my baby brother.”

Gregory fought to keep from rolling his eyes. Ema nodded toward the rear of the house. “Let’s eat in the kitchen as it’s so sunny.”

“Just toast and honey for me,” Gregory said. He’d said it earlier, but telling Ema not to cook was like telling a fish not to swim.

Gregory followed Ema to the kitchen, too bright for his eyes, sun streaming painfully through the window. He looked to the table and saw tomato slices, onion slices, link sausages, biscuits from a can, and a blue porcelain bowl full of thick yellow goo. He stared, feeling his stomach begin to foam.

“Is that mamaliga?” he whispered. The pendant glistened between Ema’s fat breasts as she picked up the bowl and brought it near, as if offering Gregory a gift. He smelled fumes coming from the pile of cheap, filthy and inescapable Romanian porridge.

He turned away. “Get rid of it. I can’t look at that shit.” Gregory’s hands clenched into fists and blood roared in his ears. He slapped the bowl from Ema’s hands. It spun to the floor and shattered, the thick cornmeal porridge breaking into pieces.

“IF YOU WANT ME TO STAY YOU’LL GET THAT SHIT AWAY FROM ME!”

“I’m s-sorry,” Ema said, her voice trembling. “S-so sorry, Grigor. I only wanted to make you happy. I only w-want—”

“STOP WITH THE FUCKING GRIGOR!”

Bawling as if her world had exploded, Ema turned and ran from the kitchen. Her toe caught in the rug and she stumbled to the floor and lay there crying.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry …”

Gregory ran his options. He had to tell her he was sorry. Ema had made the sickening slop, but now he was the one who would have to apologize. The Moron World went by rules that were inside-out.

He walked to his sister and leaned to touch her back. “Are you all right, Ema?”

A shiver ran through her body. “I’m so sorry I made you mad. I always do stupid things. I’m so ashamed.”

“I’m the one that’s sorry, Ema,” Gregory said, his expression blank since Ema’s face was in the carpet. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry.”

“Hold me, Gregory,” Ema wailed, trying to roll to sitting, the pendant flapping across her skin, into the folds of her breasts. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please hold me, Gregory. No one ever holds me.”

Gregory felt his skin crawl, but lowered himself to the rug and wrapped his arms around his sister as far as they would reach. Her body heaved with sobs and her odor rose to his nose and mingled with the smell of the mamaliga splattered across the kitchen floor. The smells turned to the stink of shit and Gregory fought the urge to retch.

“I never want to hurt you,” Ema wailed in English, then the same in Romanian, the old native tongue rising unbidden through tears and fear. “Hold me, Grigor,” Ema bawled, clutching at Gregory’s surrounding arms and making him wish he could disappear into the air.

What happened next?

Gregory escaped after a depressing half-hour. The smell of Ema and the mamaliga and all the female odors of the house had fired up a shrieking pain that pounded his temples. He returned to his house to try again to clean his car, but grew livid with anger once more: the stains had set and the smell had gotten worse in the heat of the garage.

There was no sign of the porn magazine the cops had found and brandished, as if it never existed except as a whip to flay him with. That seemed odd, and Gregory looked beneath the seats, in the glove box. The fucking thing was nowhere to be seen, nothing in the car but a stench as thick as cold mamaliga.

He had to sell the car, his beautiful creamy Avalon. He could never get the stink out. A thirty-five-thousand-dollar car turned to dross by the morons. The two cops were subhumans from the robot caste and Gregory would grind them beneath his heel as if he was stepping on ants.

Striving for calm in his writhing guts, he made himself walk to the utility sink in the corner to soak his hands in de-greasing soap. No, Gregory revised as his palms rubbed beneath the water. It wasn’t the ants. The real problem was the anthill. It wasn’t the two morons who had savaged him, it was the process that had created them, made them feel invincible. They were a Blue Tribe. Their own form of dress, symbols, rituals, special pledges and codes … all tribal.

Gregory returned to the cool of his house and recalled lessons from history. When one tribe wanted to inflict great hurt on another tribe, they killed its chief, a symbolic beheading of the entire tribe. Behead your enemy and jam his head on a pike, a dripping and fly-encrusted trophy that said I Win, You Lose.

Gregory suddenly felt a delicious calm in his tormented belly. He would humiliate the police, the Blue Tribe. It would take work, it would take planning, but he would behead the Mobile Police Department.

He would kill its Chief.

Moarte. Death.

Chapter 12

“I think I have all the information I need for my article, Dr Szekely,” the young reporter said. She clicked off her recorder and closed her pocket-sized notepad. “Is there anything else you want to add?”

Dr Sonia Szekely stared across her paper-strewn desk at her questioner: blonde, blue-eyed, skin the hue of a spring peach. The reporter wore a loose and flippy miniskirt, tank top, pink running shoes over short white socks, and represented the newspaper of a local university. I’ve got plenty to add, Szekely considered saying. If you’ve got the stomach for it, which I doubt. Instead, Szekely looked down at her age-wrinkled hands, fought her need to light a cigarette, and regarded the reporter with bemusement.

“How old are you, my dear?” Szekely asked. Her eyes wandered past the reporter to her overloaded bookshelves holding such titles as Ceauşescu’s Orphanages: a History of Hell, The Pathology of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Psychic Damage in Early Childhood. Other titles were in Romanian.

“I’m twenty, Doctor. Almost twenty-one. Why?”

“The worst of what I’m telling you happened before you were born. The wretched Ceaușescu regime in Romania, the plight of the orphans, the decades of horror and human wreckage—”

“I got that, Doctor. About how Cacesku—”

“Ceaușescu,” Szekely corrected. “Nicolae Ceaușescu.”

“Sure,” the reporter nodded, flipping open her notepad to glance inside. “Ceaușescu wanted to grow the country’s workforce so he outlawed birth control and demanded large families, but the country was so desperately poor the children couldn’t be cared for and were placed in state-run orphanages.” The reporter wrinkled her button nose. “Nasty places.”

“Yes,” Szekely nodded, thinking, They were more than nasty, miss, they were hell on earth, a dark bloom of evil that poisons to this day.

“But what does my age have to do with that nasty moment in history, Doctor?”

Szekely felt her legs propel her to standing. Heard her voice grow loud.

“It’s not history!”

The reporter’s eyes went wide. Szekely waved her hand in apology and sat down again. Took a deep breath.

“Forgive me. My work means reliving events of that time almost daily. Plus I’m a bit fearful you’ll view these orphanages as having no more hand in our present lives than a faded newsreel from World War II. Yet they’re with us today. That’s the real story.”

The young woman frowned. “But if the Romanian orphanages have been changed and the children saved—”

“Physical salvation differs from psychic salvation. Physically, the children may have been removed from conditions of horror, but in many cases the horrors have not been removed from the children.”