Warpath

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened, Graham.”

“Gang. Drive-by...they hit the wrong house,” Clevenger says. His voice is coming from a desert somewhere far away where shattered men go when they’ve lost their way. “They killed Grandma.”

4

In the days following the hit attempt that left me with a damaged brain and no job, Clevenger was there.

In the days following the drug case that hammered coffin nails into six drug peddlers and hammered a revenge-needle into my neck, Clevenger was there.

In the days following me coming to in a hospital, delirious and confused, enraged and swimming in the after-effects of a designer drug that did more killing than drugging, Clevenger was there.

My old partner in the homicide bureau, the detective who took my place as reigning king, the only man who is my family now.

As a homicide detective I got my ass in deep trouble. Rather than fire me I was transferred away from Graham and into Living Hell: stolen autos. To get any action I started volunteering for undercover buys on a big bust against a drug cooked up by Satan himself. Called The Big Fry, it was cheap and lethal. The first dose killed some users outright, let others live just to rot them out slowly. But with some it caused what we coined as Gray Matter Detonation, which was a fancy term for becoming a vegetable. Imagine a bunker-buster of a stroke with permanent bloodshot eyes, drooling lips and absolutely nothing else. No response to stimulus. Confined to diapers and IV diets. Damnation this side of hell.

And then there was another group, small. Handpicked by Fate herself to suck it slowly. The smeared. They have a bizarre brain chemical reaction that foils the drug’s ability to kill instantly. Instead, like acid flashbacks, the drug pops back up here and there. Just in bursts. Smears.

I helped another detective named Garrett take down some folks associated with Big Fry, and their associates found me one day and shot me up with a lethal dose. Left me for dead. I found a hospital before death found me. But the dose wrecked my brain before giving up. I’m smeared.

So imagine me in some recovery ward, in and out of consciousness for days. Nearly sixty, still built like a bull surrounded by all those nurses, having what they called “an episode.” Disassociation from reality.

Me snapping out of it, wrapping the lines and wires around my fists like chain around a street boxer’s knuckles, yanking. Flying off whatever tenuous handle medical staff had established for me. Wanting to make sense of it, wanting revenge of my own, wanting to beat and claw and destroy my way back to a frame of mind that wasn’t composed of threads and flashbacks.

The smears like waterfalls of boiling oil colored like rainbows, each one washing ice over my mind. That consuming needle of brain-freeze stabbing down my neck, radiating a sensation close to death but too much of a cocktease to really be it. Red to orange to brown to purple to blue to black to unconsciousness. I couldn’t handle it. It was like filling a turkey baster with liquid agony and shooting it behind my eyes.

I’d go apeshit in that room. Storm the hall, gown flapping in the wind and blood pouring down my arms from the IVs I had just torn out and flung across the room. Shameful. But if I could kill a mountain of people to regain what that single injection had taken from me, in those moments, Big Fry smears painting nightmares on the canvas of my everything, I would do it. I would kill until I had it back.

Clevenger was there. Other than him, I had no one. No one except Clevenger and his wife Molly. People with no reason to love me but who still did. Beyond partners, beyond boys in blue looking out for their own. We’re family.

I know we brawled. Probably more than once. But despite whatever foul words I spouted, whatever taunts and chest-poking, Graham just cared for me enough to wrestle a destroyed and naked old man back into his bed. Pin him down until his episode passed. Until he finished disassociating from reality and came back to all those nice, clean associated people.

My captain never came to visit. The guys I worked beside, they never came. Garrett kind-of had an excuse because the same guys who hit me got their mitts on him. He lived. Barely.

It was just me, Clevenger and Molly, the incessant beeping of the monitoring equipment, the loving spirit of my dead wife who no doubt watched over me and all my nightmares in that damn hospital.

And I was there way too long.

5

Evening, Sunday

Saint Ansgar’s finest are there when I arrive.

Night is heavier here than it was back at my place. The street lamps hum in tones of piss yellow and ill green up and down the street. Emergency lights spill LED red and blue in alternating punches along the homes. The bitter tinge to the air feels purposeful tonight; as if evening were a woman baring her teeth at what has occurred here.

Clevenger stands on the porch, running a hand through his hair. The brilliant red caresses him and he looks soaked in blood. The blue washes over and he looks like a phantom.

Behind him, the scene of the crime is really nothing more than an unassuming one-story ranch. The house faces east with a two-car driveway but only a one-car garage. A picture window, some decorative shutters and his grandma’s flower garden. Looking at the garden, which is still a bare patch of earth waiting for warmer climates so it may be planted, like Graham. A bare patch of humanity, now. Just waiting.

I get out of the car, crush my smoke onto the concrete. A homicide detective walks about, speaking with a CSI tech. Another tech is busy placing numbered markers next to bullet holes in the house so he can take photographs. Other markers are scattered like a game of marbles in the street, each standing sentinel over a spent shell casing.

The difference between this homicide and all the others I’ve ever worked is Clevenger. Any other homicide and we’d be standing there, not reverent to the deceased but cautious that we do not disturb any damning evidence. Talking not about how the victim baked strawberry and rhubarb pies for him as a child but instead debating which burger joint had better onion rings or make jokes that would be considered callous or distasteful to those not accustomed to seeing death as a matter of course.

Graham sees me, nods. No smile. Instead his face hardens and I know what he wants at once. The PD won’t let him near this one. Not in a million years. He’ll have good people on it, but he wouldn’t have asked me to come down here, be at the crime scene, if he didn’t want me on it as well.

The weight of my revolver settles in against me. Nudging like a hound asking to be unleashed. Give it time. Those responsible will show themselves.