Ghouls

don’t care if he dropped his drawers and shit in the street. I don’t care if he wagged his pecker in front of nuns! You don’t assault a guy just for being a fuck-up!”

“Chief, last night Stokes broke his wife’s wrist, gave her a concussion, bloodied her face like holy hell, and then kicked her out into the rain. When I found her, she looked like a glossy out of a textbook on violent crime.”

“Oh, I see,” Bard said, softening. He liked to pile on the sarcasm at timely moments. “Now I understand completely, please forgive me. Lenny Stokes beats up his wife, but model officer Kurt Morris decides to do things a little different this time. Instead of making an arrest, as the laws of this great country provide, what does model officer Kurt Morris do?” Bard jumped up from his seat, like a fat jack-in-the-box, and directly into Kurt’s face, he shouted, “He goes to Lenny Stokes’s house, knocks on his front door, and punches him in the fucking face!

Kurt feared the velocity of Bard’s rant might actually bowl him over. “All right, Chief,” he said. “You don’t have to blow a vessel just because I made an error in judgment. I admit it, I fucked up, okay? It won’t happen again.”

“Good.” Bard sat back down, the pink in his face dropping. His mustache looked like a bore brush in a pistol- cleaning kit. When he’d finally settled down, he said, “I made a deal with the state attorney’s office. They acted really reluctant about a nolle pross; I managed to talk them into it anyway, but there’s one condition, see? You only get the proseque if you demonstrate a ‘sincere motive.’ In other words, they know you’re guilty, but due to the questionable reliability of the plaintiff, Stokes, they’d rather not proceed with charges. Instead they want you to voluntarily submit yourself to disciplinary action. Of course, you don’t have to; you can take your chances in court. But if you decide not to take the disciplinary action, you can bet the back of your balls they’ll forget about the nolle pross.”

“What happens then?”

“Stokes sues you for everything right down to the last hair on your dick, for one thing. Plus, you’ll face state charges of police harassment, police brutality, dereliction of duty, and premeditated assault and battery.”

Blackmail, Kurt thought “All right, all right.”

“I knew you’d see things my way.”

“So it looks like Stokes gets off scot free.”

Bard glared incredulously. “Instead of dicking around and punching him in the face, why didn’t you arrest him?”

“It was domestic assault. I couldn’t arrest him for a misdemeanor not committed in my presence.”

“What did you do in the police academy, anyway? Circle jerk? All his wife’s gotta do is swear out a warrant request in Hyattsville. Then the county’ll bust him, charge him, and give him a court date.”

“She won’t press charges,” Kurt said.

“Why the fuck not?”

“I don’t know. I guess she doesn’t want to make a scene.”

“Then fuck the misdemeanor. If she wouldn’t swear a warrant, you should’ve snapped a few Polaroids and tried to get your own—for a felony assault. Any magistrate would go along with attempted murder if she was bashed up bad enough.”

“Chief, if I did that, she’d never speak to me again. She just wants to forget about it.”

Now Bard’s frown was squeezing his face. “Then that’s her problem, not yours. What’s the first thing I told you when you came onto the force? Never take your job personally. You do the same for your mother as you would for a schmuck you’ve never seen before. Otherwise you get in trouble, like the kind you’re in now… Shit, I’m already a man short ’cause of Swaggert, and now you gotta go fucking with local skillet-heads.”

Kurt felt like a high-schooler caught smoking in the lavatory. “So what’s the disciplinary action?”

“Five days suspension without pay, effective immediately. That’s the easiest I can let you off. Anything less and the state attorney’s office’ll be jumping in my shit for preferential treatment.”

Kurt felt disgusted, shafted, but most of all, embarrassed.

“And since you all of a sudden got some free time on your hands,” Bard said, “make yourself useful and run some errands for me. The county crime lab sent those fucked-up latents to state for further analysis. Tomorrow I want you to go to Pikesville and see what they have.”

Kurt nodded and turned, head bowed, but before he could leave, Bard added, “And look, Kurt. We’ve been friends for a good while, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You have to keep in mind, I have a police department to run, and I got rules I have to follow. If you go stirring up any more shit with Stokes, I’ll have to fuckin’ fire you, friends or not.”

“I hear you, Chief. Loud and clear. I won’t go near the guy.”

“Make damn sure you don’t.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

John Sanders looked in the mirror for the first time in a year. Deep gouges channeled most of the left side of his face; the effect made him think of tooled wax. It was as though this part of his face had been sluiced away by a spade bit, and his identity as well. The largest scar ran wormlike from the corner of his lip to the back of his jaw. He could still make out the tiny ladders of stitches which formed crescents under his eye; it was makeshift repairwork, but at least he could still blink normally. That’s all that mattered. He supposed he just as easily could have lost the eye.

By most people’s standards, his face was hideous, though John Sanders did not ordinarily regard anyone’s standards but his own. This was not reactive rationalization (he had felt this way even when the bandages had come off), and now, staring at the damage seven years later, he clearly recognized how lucky he’d been. It was luck that he hadn’t bled to death in minutes, and to this day he found it miraculous that he’d even made it off the ridge alive. O’Brien and Kinnet hadn’t been so lucky. He’d watched them die. He remembered.

Sanders didn’t care about his face; he didn’t need a face to live. He needed a brain, eyes, arms and legs, and he had all of those things. His face was unimportant. So what if people stared at him? He didn’t need people. So what if the sight of his face caused women to shudder. He didn’t need women. He didn’t need anybody.

Soon after his Med Evac from Riyadh, oro-facial surgeons at Walter Reed Army Medical Center had scheduled a dozen corrective operations, but had stopped after the first. They’d told him then that his was not a case of routine plastic surgery—to embark on a succession of operations this serious might prove more experiment than improvement as an end result. Tissue damage had been extensive. Some of the facial muscle groups had been routed from their seats; while other tracts had been not just severed, but removed, ripped away completely.

It had been Sanders’s decision then to decline on the option of corrective surgery.

Suddenly the mirror held him; it took him back. Fragments of the dim past assailed him, like scenes and images lost in faded films. Tactility. Sound. Hectic motion. A million sensations fogged by time and tricyclic drugs.

He could still feel the elastic snap, when it had hooked its alien hand onto his face and tugged.

Could still hear the slunking pop as he’d thrust his knife into its coarse, sinuous abdomen.

The night-piercing shriek of its pain.

The vision of his own life before his eyes.

And the fat, dull explosion of white phosphorus.

Thinking back now it all seemed too bizarre, such that he could barely believe it himself—but he knew it had happened. He knew. The doctors had offered countless linear explanations, matched with bland faces and treacherous eyes. Their list of speculation rolled on like the mutterings of a language from another world. Ideas of reference asserted through reversed monomania. Neuroleptic toxicity, undifferentiated hallucinotic schizophrenia. Myxedema, right cerebral dysfunction. Involutional depression and paranoid features. Unsystematized delusional