Rick arrived early, as usual, and headed down the weathered stone steps. He worked for a company called Legacy Security Systems, which did business from the basement of this downtown department store. He tapped his security code into the electronic lock box and swung the metal door open, which led him to a dimly lit hallway with a low ceiling, chipped cement walls, and a threadbare dusty carpet through which underlay peeked like subcutaneous fat. The whole place smelled like mouse turds.
This hallway led to four rooms: a lunchroom, a patrol equipment closet, a small makeshift office, and a closet full of mannequin parts from the department store upstairs. Rick headed to the lunchroom. It was normally empty, but tonight Trent, the owner of Legacy Security Systems, sat at the table sipping a Cup o’ Noodles.
“Hey Rick. How you doin’ tonight?”
“Not bad. Yourself?”
“Not so good. The wife was doing the books this weekend and she says the fuel bill is high again.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. I think Eidler’s been filling his van with the business card again.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think you could talk to him about it?”
“What am I going to say? Eidler hardly knows me.”
Trent considered the ceiling for a second, then said, “It’s fine if you don’t want to. I understand.”
“So you want me to scare the shit out of Eidler.”
Trent chuckled. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Sure. I can do that.”
“Thanks Rick.” Trent got up and tossed his waste in the trash, then patted Rick on the back. “I gotta go, but you have a good shift, alright? Drive safe.”
“I always do.”
The patrol car was in a horrible state. There were food wrappers everywhere, and the interior smelled of cheeseburgers. Rick fished his personal air freshener out — a gift from his girlfriend Paulie — and hung it from the rear-view mirror. He turned the radio on, winced at the corn-pone country filling the air like an unpleasant stench, and quickly punched the fourth preset button. The cacophony of twang was replaced by a soothing voice from the past advertising Bristol Myer’s hair cream for men. 103.4 FM played old radio shows from the fifties. Rick’s favourite program — Timeless Tales from Ago — was hosted by one Frankie Galant.
Once he’d dug all the garbage out of the car, Rick pulled onto the main road and mingled with rush hour traffic. Soon these streets would grow quiet and the night would be his.
First patrol was the Tamarack, a one-story building owned by Child Reach Incorporated, a non-profit that fed and clothed the city’s less fortunate youth. The place itself looked homeless, with chipping paint and boarded up windows.
Rick pulled into the parking lot and cut the engine. On the radio, a wife had been murdered and the accused husband’s lawyer was pleading his case: If Mr. Stark had been the one to pull the trigger, Your Honour, there would have been some small trace… Rick wanted to hear more, but he had a foot patrol to perform.
He came across Burt Strand, co-owner of Child Reach, at one of the back bays. He was loading office supplies into the bed of his pickup.
“Hey Burt. You’re not dipping into the company inventory, are ya?”
“You got me. There’s a huge black market in dead computer equipment and sticky notes these days.” Burt was a naturally jovial guy but tonight he sounded glum. “No, this is Doug Reynold’s stuff. You probably heard the news.”
“Can’t say I have. Working nights, I miss a lot.”
“Right. I guess you would. Well, Doug volunteered for us. I didn’t know him personally, but I heard he was a nice guy, real passionate about the kids. Anyway, someone broke into his home on Sunday. He was killed.”
“Christ. Paulie’s been bugging me to put security bars on our windows.”
“Might not be a bad idea.”
Back in the patrol car Rick caught the tail end of the story about the guy accused of killing his wife: They never found the murder weapon, even though it was under their noses all along. I’m a handyman, so nobody was surprised to see the new cabinetry work around my house: the polished steel, pistol grade, ground down into decorative door handles…
As he drove away, he thought about Doug Reynold. About six months back Rick had been patrolling the Tamarack, had found a back door unlocked, and had gone in to investigate. The door led to a small office where he found a lanky man with copper red hair asleep on a cot. There was a stack of Polaroid photos on the desk beside him. Rick left him undisturbed.
Passionate about the kids, Rick thought. Burt, you’ve got that right.
He noticed the change up as he pulled in behind the Patterson building.
I’m going to play a song from my personal collection following each of tonight’s tales, Frankie said. Consider it a final tribute to the moments we’ve shared. Then a swing number burst from the tinny car speakers, trumpets blaring.
A final tribute to the moments we’ve shared… was that break-up talk? Rick wished he could mull it over, but he had a patrol to do.
The Patterson was, unbelievably, nearly the same age as the Tamarack, and any similarity died right there. This gilded structure, professional home to bankers, politicians, and lawyers, had been awash in government money since its inception. Its thirty stories stood sleek and splendorous against the night, like an enormous bank manager’s pen. Any kid showing up here looking for help was guaranteed a police escort from the premises.
Rick stopped at the Patterson’s revolving door, ran his middle finger down the door’s rubberized edge thirty times. Once for every floor of the building. On each pass he whispered the letters: T-h-i-r-t-y. A nice even number with a nice even number of letters. He loved how even numbers felt in his brain and on his tongue.
He entered a vast foyer encased in polished granite and lit in electric blue. It was like being in an opulent womb. Halfway to the elevators he saw something dart in his peripheral vision and snapped around. He stood for a tense moment, on guard. But there was nothing to see, and eventually he carried on.
The floors of the Patterson consisted of U-shaped hallways lined with offices. He was to patrol each floor and lock any doors that might have been left open. On the twenty-eighth floor, before stepping back into the elevator, he saw it again. Movement from the corner of his eye, a leg disappearing around the bend at the far side of the hallway. Somebody was here. Somebody was following him.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Who’s there?”
No answer.
Fear exploded in him like a grenade, a panicked certainty that he was in the presence of evil. He bypassed the elevator, sprinted through the stairwell door, taking steps three, four at a time, almost falling but always catching himself, never slowing down, scrambling like a man in flames all the way to the lobby and out the front door.
Outside, he put a shaking hand on the top of his car and tried to catch his breath. He thought, Paulie would tell me I’m being an idiot. And maybe he was. Once he was no longer sucking in the cold night air like a drowning man he looked back at the Patterson. It stood as indifferent to the world as ever. Nobody had followed him out.
He got into the car, and that was when he saw a clear plastic baggie on the console that he was certain hadn’t been there before. He picked it up and studied it in the light of a streetlamp.
It appeared to contain a tight nest of copper red pubic hair.
When you work night patrol you need a favourite place to eat, and Rick’s was a sandwich shop called Eddie’s in a derelict strip mall on the north-east edge of downtown, an area where off-campus students lived beside hard-edged bums in filthy ancient walk-ups and hookers occasionally did business in the alleys. Rick liked Eddie’s because it was never busy, they had great sandwiches, and as a regular he always got free coffee.
“Chicken sandwich,” Rick said as he entered to the tinkle of the bell over the door. The dim fluorescents cast a pallor over everything; one dying bulb blinked nonsense in the corner. The place was dead except for a guy in the corner in a John Deere cap huddling over his coffee.
Eddie stood at the counter: a paunchy grey-haired Pakistani who had legally changed his first name from Adeel decades earlier. He’d once told Rick he’d done it to fit in and attract business. Rick considered that an unnecessary effort; nobody in this part of town cared what you were called. Eddie didn’t trust anyone with his money which was why he ran the shop all by himself. He waved at Rick before dipping into the back.
“Looks like we have the place to ourselves,” the guy in the corner said when Rick sat down at the counter.
“Looks that way,” Rick said. “What are you up to this evening?”
“Just stopping on my way out of town. I’m heading to Toronto.”
“I’ve always wanted to go there. I’ve heard in Toronto a man can shed his skin. Somebody told me that once, anyway.”
The stranger removed his cap. His hair was copper read and neatly trimmed. Rick considered mentioning the follicles he had in a baggy in his car, then decided not to.
“It wasn’t really my decision,” the man said. “When Frankie tells you to walk you don’t argue.”
The music playing over the shop’s speakers faded away, replaced by Frankie saying: In the infamous words of one Mel Blanc, ‘That’s all, folks.’ My kindest regards to all my loyal fans who kept this shared dream alive. Now it’s time to tip my hat to the Land of Ago. Take care, fellow travelers.
This was followed by silence. Rick stared at the wall speaker until he was convinced Frankie had nothing more to say. When he returned to himself the stranger was gone.
“Your sandwich, Rick,” Eddie said, setting the plate in front of him, along with the free coffee Rick never had to ask for. “You want anything else?”
“Actually, would you wrap this up for me Ed? Thanks.”
There were patrols to run.
He pulled into Johnson’s Meat Packaging at ten past three, gravel grinding under his tires. A brown plastic box about the size of a deck of cards hung from a rusty chain on the front gate. Rick searched his ring, found the stubby skeleton key with the blunt rectangular end, inserted it into the box, and turned until he heard a click. These boxes recorded his patrol times. There were twelve more along the route.
When he opened the door, the greasy stench of dead carcass and ammonia wafted over him. He’d worn nose plugs when he’d first started patrolling this place, which had only forced the stink through his mouth to become a taste. Now he barely noticed it.
The inside felt like a prison — everything grey concrete, even the lunchroom, where the only splashes of colour were the snack machines and the red lunch tables. Rick turned the lights on, and bare bulbs bathed the place in an underwater glow.
His patrol went without incident until he was nearly at the killing floor. Then, once again, he saw something from the corner of his eye.
It had followed him. Somehow it had followed him.
He thought it had gone down to the boiler room. He was headed that way anyway. Still, when he got to the stairs leading to the basement his legs stopped. They didn’t want to go down there; he didn’t want to go down there. And yet he knew that he should. His therapist always told him to face his fears. He’d been coaxing Rick to open up in the safety of the therapy room, but Rick thought if it didn’t apply here, in real life, then what kind of shit advice was it? Whatever it was that was following him, it wasn’t going away on its own. Trouble rarely did.
The smell of ammonia was much worse downstairs. The walls were so dirty they looked fur lined. There were streams of what looked like black snot running through small troughs cut in the floor. The light, coming from bulbs thick with gunk, was strangled to a dim glow.
He passed the huge boilers, each one roughly the size of an SUV. He glanced at the pressure gauge on each one, not reading the numbers but checking the colours: green meant everything was fine; yellow meant make a note and leave it on the foreman’s desk; red meant get the hell out and call the foreman on his direct line from a distance.
Something scuttled in the semi-dark. Rick aimed his flashlight in the direction of the last boiler.
There it was. The thing that had been torturing him from the edge of his senses.
A filthy young man wearing a T-shirt and mud-caked jeans stood before him. The man’s shirt had once featured a logo, but now it was smudged with muck. His face was covered in horrific scabs and lacerations. Half his nose appeared to be missing.
“Who are you?” Rick asked.
“Who do you think I am? I’m Danny. You abandoned me at a Dairy Queen three years ago.”
They were locked together, Rick staring into the crazy man’s eyes, those mad orbs staring defiantly back at him. That feeling of panic that he’d experienced at the Patterson gripped him again, that cold realization like an implosion in his mind, that certainty that he stood at the heart of evil.
Rick bolted and Danny did too, as if they were connected by an invisible rope. Danny was on him, wrestling him to the ground, but Rick managed to break free. He shot up the stairs, through the building, and out the front door. Outside it was pouring rain. He’d left his jacket in the car. By the time he got to the vehicle he was as soaked as if he’d gone swimming. He wiped dripping bangs from his eyes as he dropped the car into reverse and began to back down the long driveway. He slammed on the brakes when he heard a meaty thud at his back bumper.
Danny shambled into the glare of the headlights like some Frankenstein’s monster. There was no way he could have gotten there so fast, but there he was.
“Let me in,” Danny hollered. “We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t,” Rick shouted. He floored it, accelerating recklessly backward, tossing large grey stones at Danny, who faded into the dark.
Rick got back to home base at quarter after four. The morning sun rose like a distant fire on the horizon as he pulled the patrol car into the underground parking entrance. Inside he dropped his leather belt and walkie-talkie in the equipment room and then headed to the lunchroom. The lunchroom lights were on. They should have been off; Eidler wouldn’t be in for another half hour.
It turned out Trent was still in the lunchroom; he’d never gone home. Someone had killed him, dismembered him, and put him back together with duct tape and mannequin parts from down the hall. His severed head sat atop a shapely female torso. One arm and both legs were smooth, blood smeared plastic. He was propped up in a chair, his mannequin hand tipping his head at the chin. He looked confused. His innards spilled out of the microwave oven.
“Jesus,” Rick whispers. He stepped in something slick. A message had been written on the floor in squeeze cheese from the fridge:
Eidler stop stealing gas. This is what happens. Mgmt.
Rick left, careful not to touch anything on his way out.
She woke to the creak of the desk chair in the corner.
“Rick? When did you get home? What time is it?”
“Do you remember how we met?”
Paulie sat up, tugging at her crooked top. What the hell was he talking about?
“Did something happen at work?”
“Yes, something happened at work. But answer the question. Do you remember how we met?”
“Of course I do. I was working at Dairy Queen down the street. You came in every Saturday afternoon and ordered a chicken burger. You always sat in seat eleven.”
“What was my name then?”
Paulie wasn’t surprised by the question. Rick had a habit of forgetting things most people didn’t forget. “You went by Danny back then. Your middle name.”
“Right. Well, Danny’s back. He’s after me.”
“Rick, you’re Danny.”
Rick began to sob like a child. Even though he was soaking wet, Paulie made room for him in the bed. She would go sleep on the couch once he settled. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his forehead.
“I think I have to leave,” Rick said. “You can sell my stuff. I’m not taking any of it.”
“If that’s what you want,” she said. This wasn’t a surprise either. They’d been teetering toward separation for a while now.
After a few minutes Rick got up and left. She heard the door open and close, then the deadbolt slide into place. She would talk to the landlord in the morning about getting the locks changed. She grabbed her pillow, a dry blanket from the closet, and fell asleep on the couch.
Later someone knocked on the door. She pulled her robe on, thinking: It had better not be Rick. But she knew it was. Who else would it be? He could have used his key, but he didn’t always function rationally, especially when he was upset. She would let him stay for the night. It was the least she could do.
She opened the door and blinked. When what she saw didn’t get any clearer she blinked again.
It was Rick, and yet it wasn’t. This man wore muddy jeans and a destroyed T-shirt. He had a face that looked like it had been torn off and haphazardly slapped back on. A long-handled axe was slung over his shoulder as casually as one might hold an umbrella. The blade looked rusty in the light of the hallway, only the rust dripped onto the carpet and left a stain there.
“Hello Paulie,” the not-Rick said. “Long time no see.”
She recognized the shirt, despite the front being almost entirely obscured with dirt: it was AD/CD — the Ball Breaker tour to be precise. Rick – no, Danny – had worn that shirt the day she met him.
Danny raised the ax and swung like a lumberjack. Paulie felt and heard the contact with her skull, as bright and shattering as a stroke of lightning. She rushed in all directions, a circular wave, spreading thinner and thinner until she was nothing but an echo.
Rick squinted into the back window of Paulie’s Chevette. Once he was satisfied there were no unwanted passengers, he opened the driver’s side door and dropped in.
“Did you switch the plates?”
“You bet,” came the answer from the back seat.
Rick swung the car out into the alley.
“Did you see him?” the man in the back seat asked. “Danny?”
“No. I think we’re in the clear.”
Getting out of the city was frazzling because morning rush hour had begun, but once they were on the highway Rick relaxed. The plan was in motion. They would drive for a few hours and then find another car. They were on their way.
“Remember what you promised,” Rick said to the back seat. “You have a chance to start over here. No more messing with kids. Deal?”
Doug Reynold tipped his John Deere cap and said, “Deal.”
Rick didn’t really believe him, but that was alright. Once they got to their destination, they could part ways. He turned the radio on and found a country tune. Something about friends in low places.
Its easy swagger soothed his jangled mind.
THE END