The Subtle Art of Brutality

“The question is, why?”

“If Delilah Boothe did this it could be because she was seriously delusional and madly in love,” I say, collecting plot points. “And she somehow found out he considered her...what’d he call it? A sport fuck. She loses her job over it, he blows her off, divorces the woman she wanted him to divorce, marries some other gal instead of her.”

“It would jive with the Betrayer carving.”

“And the dick in his mouth.”

“A woman scorned.”

“Yup,” I say, stepping outside for a smoke. “A woman scorned.”

41

The buy: Jared Garrett’s informant was a weasel he dug up who had a laundry list of charges and bench warrants pending and we squeezed in all the right places.

His name was Alfonso, but everyone knew him as Rodent. It fit him. Your informant is only as trustworthy as the gun you have to his head, and we held enough iron to his to ensure compliance.

Rodent introduced Garrett and I to the seller. We bought for a while and built a case. The seller went down, along with six other guys. The bust was huge. The D.A. looked like he was made out of twenty-four karat gold. I thought it was my ticket back to homicide.

I’d call Graham just about every day, feeling like an excited little school girl. Tell him to dump his partner and make sure I had a big desk to return to.

Rodent got hooked up for the bust, but even with that he got fifteen to life when it was all said and done. A few months after he went in he was found dead, stuffed in a crevice somewhere in the prison’s laundry facility. We didn’t think anything of it; he was arrogant and annoying; an ankle-biter of a man with an obnoxious voice and a penchant for stirring the pot just to see the fireworks.

Then Garrett didn’t come into work one day. I didn’t care a bit; Flemming had just sent me an official notice I was getting an extension at stolen autos. I was planning on how I was going to ruin Flemming’s life while Garrett was being beaten by some associates of the dealer we hit. And Garrett sang. Told them everything.

They dropped him off on a street four blocks from the Saint Ansgar riverfront about the same time I was finishing a hamburger and fries at the local cop-friendly joint.

Garrett didn’t call the unit, didn’t call me. Instead, battered and half-dead he wandered around in a daze until EMS picked him up. He even managed to wet himself. His lips were bloody and swollen. His chest was knifed up pretty bad. Both hands broken. One foot as well. His face was one solid mass of purple swelling. His right ear cauliflowered.

His wife and kids were untouched, and I think that threat, the threat to kill Monica and the twins, that was what got my name out of his lips.

As mad as I get for how my life was ruined, when I see the mental picture of Monica, her dark hair swaying in the wind as she coddled both those infants that Garrett was so proud of, I forgive him. Then her image washes from my mind like sparkles in a heavy breeze, floating away to pepper some other area with their glitter. And then, I hate him all over again.

I never saw it coming. Someone clocked me good and it was all I could do to not piss my pants as I went down. Whatever happened next the doctors and I speculated. All I can think about was the blackness that swam over me in that one split second where I knew I was hit because I was still feeling it connect, but there was nothing I could do.

A

n indiscernible amount of time later and the veil of shadows stretched across my life began to slowly, unsteadily lift. I came to and my head was poisoned. My stomach was turning over and over. My body was alive with an electricity that frightened me with its power. Shapes and colors were dancing in my skull and I vomited. It was red with blood. And black with a coffee ground-like substance. Half-digested blood looks like that.

Ditched in an alley. Like trash. I walked out of that tight brick corridor onto a major street I would have recognized if I were in my own mind and body. A woman in a business suit walked past me. I think I asked her something along the lines of where am I and she refused to answer.

Instead, she screamed. She screamed bloody murder.

Her eyes were drawn to my neck, which burned molten and infected. I ignored her, feeling various shades of that pain up and down my body. I threw up again. Reeling from the fit of nausea I blacked out in the street. I guess EMS got me also. I came and went for an hour or so and eventually the scenery changed from the street to a trauma room.

Inside, all the words in my head, all the questions, pleas for help, outrages at my condition, they were cotton in my mouth. Useless and jumbled like a handful of marbles without a jack.

Two nurses and a tech took possession of me. They extracted a syringe from my neck, the source of all that blistering hot pain and misery. Left there by my assailants as a message, they shot me so full of the Big Fry that even without a gray matter detonation I should have been poisoned to death. Whacked. Eighty-sixed.

My head was split open, my face gashed. Maybe it was cut. Maybe it ripped open from the fall I took after being knocked unconscious. Or being thrown out of a vehicle into an alley.

The hospital did their best for me, and in the end the only resounding effect I have is the damage to my mind. The smearing. The lost time.

After surgery, after the drug overdose treatment, I got to share a room with another man whose luck had run out that day. Every now and then his family would leave his side to check on me. I would look up through bleary and unsure eyes, not trusting their information anymore, but I would see Monica looming over me, telling me that Garrett says he’s sorry and everything will be all right.

But it was not, and the police decided I could not serve them anymore.

As the detective sergeant for his squad, Pierce White’s murder is Clevenger’s squawk if he wants it.