What do
they say in movies when they’re in situations like this? There’s like an inner
monologue throughout. Huh. Guess it’s a lot like this. Now, what what what what
what do I do? It’s dark, dark enough. It’s pitch black. No it’s not, it’s the
city. Streetlamps. Everywhere, streetlamps lighting the streets. Where are
there no streetlamps? The country. I don’t have a car. No can do. Nonono.
Industrial neighbourhood. Streetlamps, but nobody to watch. But the cameras.
Just go. Do it. Just do it. I’m in a fucking Nike commercial. Fuck. This is
serious, I shouldn’t joke. Shouldn’t joke. Somebody’s going to die. Sooomebody.
Here, boy. Soooooooomebody. Here, come here, boy. That would be easy, just to
lay out a tarp and strap them down. But I have to go out there. I have to bring
my knife. Oh shit, I only have kitchen knives. Shit. Well, there’s the
vegetable knife. There’s the cleaver. When did I get the cleaver? I never use
that thing. Focus. Fooocus. Be real, is it feasible. Do you want to get caught?
Yeah, that’s it. Talk to yourself in the second person. YOU are going to kill
somebody. Nono, YOU are going to KILL somebody. Tonight. In this city. In an
alley. A fucking alley! Why didn’t I think of that earlier? YOU. Why didn’t YOU
think of that earlier. Be detached. Deeetachment. Fooocus. Out the door. Don’t
forget the knife. In your jacket. There’s no room in this jacket. Fuuuck I
don’t want to use the winter coat, I’ll look like a murderer. YOU’ll look like
a murderer. Shit, you will be a murderer. Go for it. Play the part. What do
they say? Real killers don’t dress like killers. Nobody says that. Fuck. Ok,
right jacket, out the door. It wasn’t raining this afternoon. Better get an
umbrella. What the fuck are you saying? Umbrella? No killer uses umbrellas.
MAN FOUND DEAD, UMBRELLA
THROUGH NECK
An unidentified man was found dead
early this morning at the corner of Mitchell St. and Stroud Ave. The man was
found behind a dumpster at 3:30 AM by passersby, walking home from a local bar.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene. Doctors say he suffered from multiple
stab-wounds and an umbrella lodged into the mouth, and through the trachea.
Inspector Morris, who believes
the murder was committed around midnight, has yet to identify a suspect. No
fingerprints were found on the umbrella, but Morris believes there to be a
second weapon with which the other stab-wounds were inflicted. The weapon has
yet to be found.
The
victim is suspected to be homeless.
“JIMBO! Wait up, brah!”
James stopped and swayed in
the street, squinting at oncoming traffic.
Tim pulled him away as a GARDA
van sped past them.
“You’re drunk, man, how you
getting home?”
James patted his pockets
lazily and said “how bout we walk?”
Tim took a swig of the beer in
his hand, and dropped the empty can into a car window left open on the street.
He took a moment to laugh at what he’d done.
“Shit, man, okay. But I’m
staying over. I’m not paying for a cab this time of night.”
“For sure.”
Tim and James walked their zig-zag
pattern through the streets, daring traffic to hit them and women to come home
with them. At Truro Street, James stopped to relieve himself on a wall. Tim took
this opportunity to try tying James’s shoelaces together, but James lost his balance
and kicked him in the face as he stumbled backwards. Both of them were sprawled
out on the street.
“Fuck, man,” Tim said.
James looked at his bloody
palms. They were covered in loose pavement and blood. Tim had his hand up to
his face, blood leaking through his fingers.
“Fuck you, man. That was retarded. What were you trying to do?”
Tim leaned to one side and spat
out more blood.
James got up and said, less
enthusiastically this time, “Fuck you, man.” Then he offered his hand to Tim
and hoisted him up.
“You should get that looked
at, man. I think I hit you pretty hard.”
“No shit.”
They walked in silence for the
next few blocks, both of them sobering up and resenting the hard, dirty
sidewalks and dark, quiet alleyways more and more. The city at night took on a fragile
decrepitude, which both of them felt but neither expressed. This was a place
friendships could break and people could break and everything was broken and
goddamnit there must be something beautiful here. But they just walked, past
all of this, Tim clutching his face and James thinking, “Can you get rabies
from scraped hands?”
The rain started suddenly, and
the smell of wet cement started seeping up out of the cracks, into the air.
“I always feel cleaner after
it rains,” offered James.
Tim grunted and spat a wad of
blood out. It twisted and turned in the rainwater before being sucked in by the
gutter.
“I need to take a piss. Hold
on,” Tim said.
James stood on the end of the
alley, having given himself the duty of lookout in case someone were to walk by
and notice his friend standing next to the dumpster. No one was out, but he
felt his duty was a favour to Tim. This would fix what had happened.
“FUCK. FUCKFUCKFUCK WHAT THE
FUCK?”
James spun around to see Tim
sprinting towards him. Terrified, James started running too. Tim had snapped.
He had had enough of pretending he wasn’t mad and was going to kill him. He was
going to slam James onto the ground and beat the life out of him. James ran as
fast as he could away from his crazed psychopath friend.
“HELP! HEEEEELP!” screamed
James. But he knew there was no one to hear him. He had been keeping a lookout.
“FUUUUUUCK!”
“HEEEEEEELP!”
“GODDAMMIT STOP,” yelled Tim
James stopped and turned to
Tim, panting, “What was that?”
Tim sat down on the ground, no
longer holding his face, dripping blood.
“Some guy.”
James looked confused, “Some
guy?”
“Yeah some fucking guy.”
James bent over, put his hands
on his knees and laughed. “Oh fuck man I thought you were crazy. I was running
away from you. Some dude was there?
Doing what?”
Tim cleared his throat of
blood and phlegm and spat it out.
“No, man. Some dude was dead.”
James looked up at Tim, who
was holding his face again.
“Are you sure he was dead?”
Tim coughed, then said “The
dude had a fucking umbrella in his neck, I’m pretty fucking sure.”
James took the flask out of
his pocket and slid it to Tim. Tim picked it up, took a swig and spit it out.
“FUCK. That shit burns.”
“Sorry man. I didn’t mean to
hurt you.”
Tim sat immobile for a while,
letting the rain stream down his neck and face, down his shirt and under his
belt. James put his hand on Tim’s back.
“Come on, man. What are we
gonna do?”
Tim looked at his blood flowing
into a sewer grate.
They’ll find me. They’ll think
I killed him. All this DNA at the scene. Fuck, I practically pissed on the guy.
Can they tell who you are if you pissed on a man? My blood’s all over the place.
What can I do about the blood? It’s raining, it’ll wash away. Maybe if I go buy
some bleach. No, there’s no place that sells bleach at this hour. What am I
saying? That’s what a killer would do, is bleach this place, destroy the evidence
and everything. I’m not a killer. I’m no killer. I didn’t kill a man. Shit, I
got kicked in the face tonight when I was trying to play a joke! Cops would buy
that, right? I would buy that if I were a cop. I would totally buy that. Then
why did you piss on a dude? Fuck. I pissed on a dead dude. I’m gonna go to
prison or go to hell or... fuck. You didn’t see him. You didn’t see him until
it was too late. It’s dark, it’s an easy mistake to make, isn’t it? The cops
won’t see it that way. They’ll see it as desecrating a dead body. You’re
basically a necrophile with a piss fetish. Shit, you are scum. You’re in for it
now. No you’re not. Leave. That’s right! They don’t have you in that database!
Do they have a database? How do cops find people with fingerprints? It must be
even easier when you have somebody’s DNA. If they get your DNA. They’ll
probably just think that it’s all his blood and they won’t even realize you
pissed on a dead guy. It’s raining. It’s raining. Fuck I wish I had an
umbrella.
Tim
looked up: “Is there a payphone near your place?”
Inspector Morris looked at his
clock-radio. 4:17. The phone was ringing. He cringed at his own breath as he
sighed and picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
He listened for a while.
“Alright.”
Another while.
“I don’t know. Twen – Thirty minutes.”
He hung up.
The room was dark, like a
black velvet curtain had dropped onto the stage. He lifted himself up heavily.
His body was weak and it felt like a bag of cement was strung to his neck. After
rummaging in his bedside drawer, he found the bottle of cheap brandy he had
left and poured himself a tall one. He drank three large gulps before realizing
that he had used the glass as an ashtray the night before. He held the brandy
in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed it.
He got dressed without turning
the lights on: jeans, the cleaner of his two dress shirts, jacket, wallet,
badge, keys, phone. Cigarettes. He pulled one out and out it between his lips
before stepping out the door and into the tan Plymouth Voyager.
As he pulled into the alley,
only the beat cop acknowledged him and pointed him to a spot.
“Can’t ID him, no wallet, no
cards, no nothing,” said the beat cop, walking to the van.
“What’s he look like?” asked
Morris.
“Not good.”
The beat cop led Morris to the
dumpster.
“Christ,” said Morris.
“Yeah, pretty grizzly.”
“No, it’s a goddamn hobo! Why
the hell would I get out of bed at 4AM for a hobo who probably got shanked in
the neck with an umbrella by another hobo who wanted his motherfucking shopping
cart to wheel around three dollars’ worth of cans?”
Morris rubbed his forehead.
The headache was only getting worse.
“I gotta radio somebody,” he
muttered, turning to his van.
He reached under the driver’s
seat and pulled out his son’s sippy cup. He was glad to have filled that
instead of the flask. That would have looked too obvious. He put the bendy
straw between his lips and sucked on the brandy. It burned his throat, like swallowing
a pack of razorblades and a bag of salt, but it would help his headache.
He walked back out to the body
“Take a couple pictures. Write
up a report, ‘Male, ID unknown, dead presumed murdered...’”
As he turned around, he saw a Channel
15 news truck pull up. Out spilled the cameraman, as talkative as a bag of wet
mice, the sound recordist, whose face cried out for a fist, and the reporter.
Her short skirt rode up when she hopped out of the truck. Her legs were smooth
and porcelain white. She looked at Morris before tugging her skirt back down.
“Nobody say anything. I got
this.”
She made sure the camera was
pointed at her, and as soon as she got close, she hollered: “Inspector Morris!
Can you tell me what happened here?”
“It’s not very exciting.”
“It’s a murder? Sounds pretty
dreary,” she said, smiling.
“Can’t say that yet. You know
the rules.”
“Who’s the poor man?”
”We don’t know who he is, yet,”
said Morris.
“So it is a he.”
Shit, stupid mistake.
“Can’t confirm or deny it.”
“Is it this man?” she asked,
holding up a tiny photograph. He leaned in, squinting. She seemed to pull the
photograph further and further away, closer to her face. He saw her lips out of
the corner of his eyes. As his gaze turned to her, he saw the cameraman jogging
towards the dumpster.
“HEY. YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN
HERE!” Morris saw that the reporter smile.
After a moment of indecision, the
two officers grabbed the cameraman by the armpits and carried him back to the
van as he started to vomit, narrowly missing his own camera, which dropped to
the pavement, bouncing and rolling back towards the dumpster.
Morris grabbed the reporter’s
arm: “You want this? Fine. A man, homeless, dead behind a dumpster. Fuck, I
dunno, he must’ve died at midnight.” Morris turned around and walked back to
the van. He called out to the officers: “Boys, just file it. It’s same-old.”
He took another sip from the
bright orange and green sippy cup as he left and shivered. He felt around for his
coat in the back seat and put it on. He reached into the pocket for a
cigarette, but he had left them in his other jacket. He swore quietly and
wished he’d brought an umbrella.
“I swear this town could kill
a man.”
