Incubi

“I don’t know.”

Veronica tried to think of Jack, but all she could see behind her eyes was Khoronos.

Chapter 2

The phone sounded like a woman screaming.

I’m dead, he thought.

That’s how he felt when he woke. The room’s darkness smothered him. He felt entombed. Buried in black.

Veronica, he thought.

The phone screamed on.

“Cordesman. What is it?”

The voice on the other end wavered, as if in reluctance or dread. “Jack, it’s me. We’ve got a bad one.”

Me was Randy Eliot, Jack’s partner. A “bad one” meant only one thing in shop talk.

“Where?” Jack asked.

“Bayview Landing…I mean, it’s really bad, Jack.”

“I heard you. How bad?”

“It looks like something ritual. I don’t know what to do.”

I’m still half drunk, Jack realized. “Call evidence, call the M. E. Seal the unit and don’t let any newspaper people near the place.”

Randy sounded drained. It must be bad, because ordinarily the guy didn’t flinch at the tough stuff. The last time they pulled up a floater, Randy was munching chicken gizzards from the Market. He chucked when the floater burst and spilled fresh maggots onto the pier.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Just sit tight,” Jack said. “I’m on my way.”

He hauled on old clothes, grabbed his Smith, and popped six aspirin. He refused to look in the mirror; he knew what he would see. Bloodshot eyes. Pale, thin face and paler body. He’d stopped working out years ago. His hair hung in strings to his shoulders. He drank too much and smoked too much and cared too little. He hadn’t always been like that. Was it the job? Or did he simply think too little of himself to cope?

Veronica, he thought.

Jack Cordesman was thirty-three years old. He’d been a county cop since twenty-two, and a homicide detective since twenty-eight. He’d been shot once, decorated four times, and had the highest conviction rate of any homicide investigator in the state. There was a time when he was considered the best cop on the department.

They paid him $46,000 per year to wade in the despair of the world. To protect the good guys and lock the criminals up. By now, though, after so many years, he didn’t even know which was which. Crime rates soared while correctional budgets were slashed. These days they were paroling guys for parole violation. One night, Jack delivered a baby in a parking lot. An hour later he gunned down a man who’d raped a thirteen-year-old girl at gunpoint. The baby died three days later in an incubator. The rapist had lived, gotten five years, and was out now on parole. Good behavior.

The truth of what he was condemned him to himself; Jack Cordesman was part of the system, and the system didn’t work.

A bad one, he recalled Randy’s words. He drove his county unmarked through the city’s stillness. They got about half of the city’s homicides because the city cops were too bogged down by rapos and crack gangs. He’d seen bad ones before; most were drug-related. Snitches chopped up like cold cuts, dealers machine-gunned for moving on the wrong turf. These crack people didn’t fool around. Once they’d firebombed an entire apartment project just to make a point.

Then there was always the ghost of the Longford case. Jack had watched the tapes he bagged as evidence. He thought he’d seen it all until the day he stared at that screen and watched grown men ejaculate into children’s faces. One of the scumbags had been chuckling as he rubbed a scoop of Vaseline between a little blond girl’s legs. And Longford himself, a millionaire, an esteemed member of the community, sodomizing a five-year-old boy…

Jack fired up a Camel and pushed it all out of his head. What was the use? If you didn’t shrug, you went nuts. If you let yourself care, you were finished. Those were the rules.

Then the thought crept back: Veronica.

It wouldn’t leave him alone. Loss? Rejection? He didn’t know what it was. He tried to be mad about it, because that seemed the macho way to be. Sad was pitiful. There’d been tears in his eyes on the way home that night. Yeah, real macho, he thought. Just a big crying pussy.

She was the only girl he’d ever loved.

They’d been friends for nearly a year first. It was almost formality; they’d meet at the Undercroft several times a week, they’d drink, shoot the shit, joke around, talk about their problems, like that. Jack had needed to talk — this was right after the Longford case — and Veronica was always there to listen. He doubted he’d ever have gotten over it without her. But he liked listening to her too. He liked hearing about the joys in her life, the sorrows, the quagmires and triumphs, the ups and downs. Her art isolated her; she’d never been in love, she’d said. She even talked about her scant sex life, which made him secretly jealous. “Nobody understands me,” she’d said so many times, her face wan in confusion. I understand you, he’d thought as many times. The fact was this: they were both misfits. That was their bond. Jack the reclusive long-haired homicide cop, and Veronica the desolate artist. Their friendship was perfect in its mutuality, but after so many months, Jack realized it was more than friendship. He realized he loved her.

That’s when the weeks had begun to pass in slow masochism. His love continued to grow, but so did his certainty that he could never tell her that. If he told her, he might lose it all. “Stewie’s always saying that you and I should be lovers,” she often joked. Jack didn’t laugh. First off, he couldn’t stand Stewie (“a silly, stuck-up, fairy- clothes-wearing asshole,” he’d once called him) and second, he agreed. Now she was talking about her disgruntled romantic life. “Guys think I’m weird,” she’d complained. “They never call me back.” What could he say? “There must be something wrong with me,” she’d say. “Maybe I’m not attractive. Am I attractive?” Jack assured her she was attractive. But how could he tell her the truth, that she didn’t fit into the regular world for the same reasons he didn’t? Each night she’d recount her latest broken quest for love, and each night Jack wilted a little more behind his Fiddich and rocks.

And just as he thought his turmoil would tear him apart, the moment exploded. He remembered it very vividly. She’d been sitting there at the bar, right next to him as usual, and out of the blue she’d said, “You know something? All this time I’ve been looking for something, and it’s been sitting right next to me all along.” “What?” Jack said. “I love you,” she said.

Jack had nearly fallen off his barstool.

It had been a wonderful beginning.

* * *

Now it’s the end, he thought. His despair hollowed him out as he drove the unmarked down Duke of Gloucester Street. He’d dated more than his share of women in his life; none of them had been anything. Only her. Only Veronica. Her weird uniqueness, her spontaneous passion, her love. All gone now. Had it been all his fault? Had he pressured her? Had he moved too fast? Craig had often suggested that he wasn’t giving her enough room to live her life. “She’s an artist. Artists are weird.” Bartenders knew people better than anyone. Jack wished he’d listened a little harder now.

And now this retreat thing. What the hell was that? Some candy-ass hippy rap session. Let’s drink wine and pooh-pooh about art. A retreat, for God’s sake. She hadn’t even said where it was. And now this guy, this… What had she said his name was?

Khoronos.

More barkeep philosophy. Long ago, Craig had told him, “No matter how much you love a girl, and no matter how much she loves you, there’ll always be some other guy.”

Khoronos, Jack thought.