Truth Front

Hellbound beneath a moonless sky the heat of the city slips away as the Six climbs into the dense brush where cellular signals die and where the eyes of men behold a darkness thick and wavering and composed of its own life force or sentience.

The white van glides through the curves, headlamps splashing light upon twisted white trunks of trees stretching endless back into shadow. Small figures jut and dip and then disappear about the periphery of the light and around each fluid curve I expect to see a group of heathens banded misshapen and ungodly in wait to pull me down into the darkness, or perhaps each grim form holds in its grip a small reflective glass fogged or streaked and veined with cracks to mirror the image of my distorted self there on that meandering purgatory. I push the accelerator deeper to the steady hum of speed and to the closing of my eyes wherein I see flashes of vast charred bone landscapes, miles of ruin swept out to an ashen horizon.

I park the van away from the squad cars and anonymous vans and cruisers and hide the shotgun under the passenger seat. The fog rolls over me like a marine force, marching souls of the sea veiled thin and moist upon my skin and hovering above the ground as if the smoke of the very earth. I flash my shield and take an elevator up the seventeen flights and nod indirectly at men both familiar and strange and I check my wrist for the time though I don’t wear a watch. My head throbs in yearning for its shorn ear and I enter Lonnie’s flat stung by the stench of cordite thick in the air.

He was lying in the same position I had left him beneath the pale glow of the overhead lamp, jagged human cuneiform in a silence broken only by the ringing in my head. If he had a face it would have been looking away from me, out to the dark envelope of the shimmering bay and all the life and terrible mystery contained in that beauty. My hand drifted to the sweaty small of my back and the sidearm stamped there.

“Hello, Detective.”

“Doctor Fitch.” I nodded.

“You up to speed?”

“Just got here,” I said, dazed not by the blood or matted gore or slick and gleaming shards of skull from the headless man but from the strange misstep of time or complete collapse of all the fundamental rules of logic and memory.

“Well this man was executed, Detective,” Fitch said. He chewed slowly on a toothpick and looked down at Lonnie. Dark eyes morose and vastly experienced and accustomed to such bloody and hellish scenes to render them anesthetized or clairvoyant. Or anesthetized to their clairvoyance. “Looks to be fairly high-cal. No casings outside the cavity. No weapon. Place is clean.”

“Seen the boss?”

“I was just gonna ask you. Your ear’s bleeding.”

“I’m okay.”

“You don’t look good, Detective.”

“I always try to incorporate a little madness into my appearance, Fitch.”

“You need a vacation,” he said, and he stepped from the light, motes swirling vicious and opaque about his absence.

There were two men kneeling next to the body taking digital photographs. Hundreds from every angle, close-up and intimate with the fibers of death. Flashing bright violence against the dark windows, and what those men and women drifting out in the bay must think about this lighting storm like silent gunfire or concentrated warfare miles away and seventeen flights upward toward the dark and star-blasted heavens.

I walked about the flat and asked questions to the officers and the medics and I checked the dispatch log and nothing made any more sense than anything else had this night. I walked out to the hallway and reached into my pocket for my phone and pressed a button.

“Lonnie’s dead.”

“I heard.”

I walked away from the cops and medical personnel weaving in and out of the flat like bees to their nest and toward a tall dark hall window where I gazed past my reflection to the night beyond.

“Shot. His head’s all over the place in there.”

“We gotta talk,” he said.

“Where are you.”

“Not far.”

“Who’s bullet they’re gonna find, I can’t say.”

“Hush,” he said. “I’ll be there in some minutes.”

I put the phone in my pocket just standing there and then the feeling rose from my gut sudden and oddly fragrant and I walked casually to the end of the hallway and ran down those seventeen flights of stairs with my heart battering from the labor and from the adrenaline and I escaped to ground level gasping into the saline night once again with the floral red glow of police beacons playing dizzied measurements about the fog. I walked to the perimeter of parked cruisers and looked toward my white van and then scanned the opposite side of the street as it bent down toward the water and I saw a dark sedan idling in menace and other sleek portents, a familiar machine occupied by mysterious figures with designs of murder and considerable firepower at the margin of the coagulating mist.