"Disciple of the dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bakker R.Scott)

MONKEY CHILDREN

Tuesday… Some prick driving one of those big-ass SUVs cut me off about an hour or so outside of Ruddick. I had just answered a call from Kimberley, so I apologized to her and rolled down the window-one of those manual cocksuckers. The wind dragged hot and oily across my face. I leaned on the horn to secure the guy’s attention-he was little more than a forehead over the rim of his passenger door-then shouted a friendly, “Dirty-mother-fucker!”

Now in the good old days, he would have rolled down his window and shouted back, something about my after-tax income, perhaps. Instead, he welded his eyes forward and gunned his behemoth. Anyone crazy enough to pick a road fight while driving an ancient Volkswagen Golf, he probably reasoned, had to have a gun in his glove compartment.

Which I did: an illegal Colt.45 automatic taped beneath a false bottom-a government model, no less. But still I found myself resenting the assumption.

“You’re driving?” Kimberley said when I picked the cell back up. “I thought you said you had stopped at a diner. ” Despite the roar of the road, I heard her draw on a cigarette.

“Are you smoking in the office?”

“No. I’m in the copy room. ”

“There’s no phone in the copy room.”

Another draw-nothing communicates impatience quite like a cigarette. “I’m. In. The copy room,”she repeated with Don’t-you-dare- start-with-me obstinacy.

I didn’t. I wanted to-I had told her precisely eleven times how alienating non-smokers found the smell of cigarettes, how she was literally driving away business. Each time she just shrugged and said, “I don’t smell anything.” Amazing really, when you think about it, how much you’ll put up with for a piece of ass.

So instead I asked, “What do you want?”

Another puffing pause. “That Chiefthing-a-ma-jingi called for you.”

“Nolen called?”

“Yup.”

“What did he want?”

“You. He wants you to come to his office as soon as you get into town.”

The Bonjours must have gotten busy with that list I gave them. Real people are like that.

“Cool… Love you, babe.”

I tossed the cell onto the passenger seat, rubbed the bridge of my nose beneath my shades. In my mind’s eye I could see the frustration in Kimberley’s look, the anger and the hurt as she sat all alone in the office. Solitude weighs heavier on strippers than most. I shook away the image simply because I breeze past things I don’t like. I make like everything is popcorn, knowing that few things are more powerful than a relentless good nature. I hurt people, knowing they will hide that hurt simply because the gag must go on.

Still, I knew I had to do something-and soon. She was in love with me. Like, totally. The drive into Ruddick was interesting. The first curious thing I noticed was that the speed limit dropped about a mile or so before you would think it should. Cracked sidewalks trimmed either side of the road, and side streets divided it at intervals you would expect in a circa-1950s subdivision, but there were no houses, only overgrown lots staked here and there by the odd lonely tree. The place was starting to remind me of Detroit.

I saw a dead squirrel, a shiny yellow toy knotted in weeds, a kid pounding dirt with a hammer. I even saw some small-town graffiti, FUCK UP NOT DOWN, scrawled across a houseless foundation. Things I needed to forget yet would always remember. You have to be prepared for the sudden onslaught of physics while driving-I know this better than most people-and yet my eyes perpetually flick this way and that, scoping out ass and other oddities.

Part of the U.S. military’s retirement package.

I passed a bustling Citgo, an abandoned GM dealership, and finally the white frame Church of the Third Resurrection before making it into the town proper.

What a dump, I thought. And I live in fucking Newark. I took a wrong turn at some point, because I somehow found myself in the industrial park peering at all the dead factories. The first was one of those rambling windowless affairs that made me think I was looking at mismatched container boxes from a distance. The second was a stripped skeleton of rust-burned I-beams. I felt vaguely disappointed: I had been hoping for something more crowded, more bricked and rotted-more Dickensian-not pastel cubes in a patchwork of vast industrial lots. Fucking modernity, man. Even our decadence and decline have become generic.

I turned around on some service road, backtracked. The downtown made me feel more at home. Someday someone will eulogize the strip mall, and I for one will shed a real tear. The way I figure it, humans have always lived and worked in aesthetic abominations. The people I saw looked stupid-walking or talking or gazing with an insolence I reflex- ively attributed to generational inbreeding. More urban chauvinism, I know, and the fact that I think everybody looks stupid. I see people the way I imagine animals must see me: nice head of hair, ape-boy, but what the fuck happened to your face?

I found the police department in a building surprising for its size. Later I would learn that in its manufacturing heyday, Ruddick had been three times bigger, population-wise. This little demographic fact would figure largely in what followed, as it so happened.

Nolen was out, of course, so I hunkered down in the vestibule with nothing more than a paunchy desk sergeant to keep me company, the kind of guy who ages watchful, if you know what I mean. Eyes so bulbous it seemed impossible he could ever shut them-entirely. A great look for a cop, actually. He was positively freaking me out, so much so I was actually relieved when my cell twittered to the riff from “Back in Black.”

“Manning,” I said in lieu of a hello.

“Hey, Disciple! This is Albert. Not catching you at a bad time, am I?”

“Naw. Just aimlessly wandering the aisles of Walmart, you know…” I winked at the glaring sergeant.

Albert Fellows was one of my bookworm buddies, a social psychologist over at New York University-one of a number of relationships I had cultivated over the years. I had called him the previous night while researching the Framers online, left a message. Since I only remembered everything people said, I continually sought people who could tell me what I needed to know. In exchange, I would score them a bag of weed here and there. You have no idea just how many academics are hard up for weed. And because they live lives so tragically insulated from crime, they tend to be almost comedically grateful.

Apparently Albert had never heard of the Framers, though he was positively giddy about the opportunity to learn more about them. He said he just wanted me to know that he was “on the case,” but I could tell he had really called out of curiosity-that he just had to know what I was up to this particular lap around the track. So I filled him in-with a good dose of my own commentary.

“Come on, Albert. Five billion years? Could something like that be for real?” I winked at the cop once more, and finally the fucker looked away. “I mean, who would fall for that kind of shit?”

A long cellphone ha-ha. “Look, Diss. The assumption is that there’s gotta be something wrong with cult members. You know. Stupid.. Weak-minded.. What have you. But the fact is, they tend to be better educated and have higher IQs than the general population-”

“Whatever,” I interrupted. “You still gotta be crazy to believe what these guy-”

“And why’s that? There’s bloody good reason why psychology and psychiary have such a hard time defining things like ‘irrational beliefs.’ Outside the realm ofpractical common sense, pretty much all human beliefis irrational. All of it! What we believe typically comes down to how the issue is framed and who gets to us first. ”

I already knew this in my peculiar way. One of the big bonuses of diehard cynicism is the ability to take heart in bad news.

“We believe things willy-nilly,” I said.

“Unto death, my friend. Unto death. ”

I hung up thinking about Dead Jennifer’s photo in my wallet. I found myself blinking at the desk sergeant, who of course had resumed his slack-faced reverie from behind the desk, staring at me like I was a stain in the wallpaper. I couldn’t resist.

“What? You run out of hay or oats or something?”

“Huh?”

That was when Chief Caleb Nolen came striding in. Rule one of private investigating is to kiss official ass-you know, Bugs Bunny-style: muh-muh-muh-muh- muh!-unless the official happens to be female, in which case you lick boots. Contrary to what you may believe, cops generally like private investigators. We make them feel superior, for one, the way I imagine a rock star feels talking to a roadie-as the “be” to their “wanna.” And some of us-especially the handsome, edgy ones like me-make them feel like they’re in a movie, which means they choose their roles accordingly. Who would you rather be in a flick, the wry veteran or the obstructionist asshole? If there’s one thing Hollywood is good at, it’s giving us roles to play. Everyone loves to pretend they’re in a movie, no matter where you go in the world. Good thing, too. If it wasn’t movies, then it would be some psychotic legend from the Middle Ages-or worse yet, Scripture.

Even so, Nolen had this sour look on his face as I took the seat opposite his desk, as if I were the druggie cousin who kept hitting Grandma up for money. That was when I realized I was wearing my I WOULD RATHER BE MASTURBATING T-shirt.

Fawk.

I glanced at my chest then looked up at him helplessly. “Um… Shit…”

No wonder the desk sergeant couldn’t stop staring. When you remember as much as I do, you end up overlooking more than a few crucial details.

“Pretty funny,” Nolen said, grinning. “Actually… ”

A wave of relief washed over me. Nolen was good people, I realized. Anyone who would rather be masturbating is good people. Self-reliance is what makes this country great.

First thing I thought when seeing Nolen was that he was the kind of cop you argued traffic tickets with-which made his position as chief something of a mystery. He was fit in a gay, long-distance-runner kind of way, with hair just shaggy enough to suggest that he liked to rock out with his iPod. He had one of those soft faces where all the features seem to crowd inward-eyes, nose, and mouth packed into a space no larger than my palm-huddling as if trying to conserve expressive warmth or something. He had to be at least thirty-five, and yet his blue eyes made him seem younger, much younger. Adolescent jumpy. Adolescent eager.

Nolen began by telling me how much he liked the Bonjours, and how “this horrible Jennifer deal” had “rocked him like nobody’s business.”

“You try to avoid it,” he said, “but you do this job long enough and you… you start sorting people, you know?”

I nodded because it seemed expected. Usually-for men anyway- phrases like “you know” are a kind of verbal bondo, just something they say. They really don’t give a fuck if you know or not. But this guy said it as if he meant it.

“My shrink,” Nolen continued, “she says it’s a kind of reflex mechanism, a thing people do to protect themselves. Terms like, er, you know, ‘decent folk,’ ah, ‘low-lifes,’ stuff like that…”

Fawk. A cop who spoke openly about his shrink to a complete stranger… The most I could do was lean back and nod. I’m not easily astonished, trust me.

“You know what I mean?” Nolen continued. “You have to crack heads in this line of work-there’s no way around it. So you… categorize… or so she says. Dehumanize… You know, to make it easier.”

Like most cynics, I have the bad, well-nigh-irresistible habit of thinking earnest people stupid. What I wanted to ask at this point was, Are you the mayor’s retarded nephew or something?

Instead I said, “Well… you know… my secretary, she called, said you wanted me to, ah, check in… ”

“Yeah. Yeah. So we could coordinate.” He leaned forward like an orphan angling for a bite of turkey dinner.

“Coordinate?”

I was afraid that the meeting would go sour. I tend to expect the worst when it comes to me and regular, decent folk, but I had no idea it would be this bad. There’s nothing quite so ripe-smelling as excessive eagerness in an adult.

“Coordinate,” he repeated. “Two heads are better than one, as they say. I just figured that a man with your expertise-”

“Expertise?”

“Expertise,” he repeated, like it was a boardroom buzzword. “I’ve only investigated four missing persons in my life. Four. You could say I’m in… well, way over my head. But I like to think I have other… you know, gifts, that compensate for my lack of experience. I’m a puzzle man. I’ve always been good with puzzles.”

Gifts? Puzzles? Was this guy for fucking real? One part of me wanted to tell him that the coach had lied, that it wasn’t cool to brandish a little dick in the change-room shower, but the other part was actually beginning to like this guy.

“This is great. Coordination. Expertise. All great. I’ll need a day or two to find my bearings on my own… you know. Then we can get down to business.”

“Sure. Sure.” He smiled with the daft credulity of a teenage Scout leader-or so it struck me. “Here,” he said, standing to hand me a small stack of folders. “I’ve gathered everything I could, you know, reports, statements-some photographs of the road she used to walk along-I’m not sure why they’re in there, but… “

I hefted the phone book-sized pile with a friendly scowl. Jennifer had been missing, what, three nights? If weight translated into thoroughness, this guy was nothing short of exhaustive. At the time I failed to realize the fear this amount of case-overkill implied.

“All great,” I said. “But would you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? I have this thing with… you know… talking stuff through.”

The Chief grinned, placed his hands on his knees in that elbows-out, getting-to-work way. “Awesome. Me too. Talking is so much better.”

Lonely, I realized. The guy was fucking lonely. He probably talked the coffee-shop regulars cross-eyed in his eagerness to brainstorm the case. Just like that I “got” Chief Caleb Nolen. He was one of those exuberant, earnest souls capable of feeling both horrified and celebratory at the same time. I had no doubt that Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance outraged him down to his deepest moral kernel. And at the same time, I knew this was the most exhilarating event in his bureaucratic life.

A real honest-to-God mystery… What would we do without dead hotties?

Never one to waste an opportunity, I began by reviewing the particulars of Jennifer’s disappearance, more to confirm the Bonjours’ version of events than anything else. Fact was, Jon and Mandy were too invested. Invested people tend to get all the details right in the wrong way, seeing ego-friendly things like hope and vindication where there is none. Caleb, I was beginning to realize, was also too invested, but in an entirely different way.

“I think about her, you know,” he said, waving his hands in a curiously frantic gesture. “Out there… somewhere… alone…” He swallowed against cracks opening in his voice. His eyes became frail in that men-don’t-cry way. “I’ve been doing this job for, well, about seven years now. I’ve even solved a murder or two-domestic stuff, though. But I’ve always felt more like a janitor, or custodian, I suppose. Cleaning up messes after they happen. But this… I mean, this girl, Jennifer… what’s happening to her is happening now. I feel guilty just taking time out with my daughter, or reading the paper. I feel guilty for being… well, you know, a small-fry cop in a small-fry town. I feel like she needs a comic book hero or something…”

I had this friend growing up, Joey Sobotka, who always told me that I had superpowers, that I would grow up to be someone important, envied and admired. A real-life superhero. He was killed in a train derailment somewhere out in Montana, of all places. Who dies in a train derailment?

And what kind of superhero lets his friends die?

“The world’s a toilet, Chief. Janitors are the only superheroes that matter.”

Apparently he didn’t know what to make of that. He just stared down at the fan of documents across his desk like a kid wondering how he was going to explain his latest D to his pop.

“Did you know her?” I asked on impulse. “Personally, that is…”

He blinked and frowned. “Yeah. She was the Framers’ representative at these community policing things we put together.”

“What was she like?”

“An angel,” he said. He laughed and scratched the back of his neck. “I would always get this… this… weird urge whenever I saw her…” He must have glimpsed what I was thinking on my face because he fairly tumbled over himself to explain. “No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”

“A gas mask, huh.”

“I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well, in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something.”

“She is, Chief. She is.”

I continued reviewing the details as the Bonjours had provided them. Not forgetting anything has made me quite the effective interrogator over the years. In a matter of several minutes I was satisfied that the Bonjour version was in fact the official version-though, given the peculiarities of Nolen’s character, it suddenly didn’t seem all that “official” at all. More like just one more dude’s take.

I then asked the standard questions, about known sex offenders, whether any recent events could possibly be related. No, not in Ruddick. None. Then I moved on to the question that had been burning a hole in my curiosity pocket.

“So I gotta ask: what do you make of the Framers?”

Nolen hesitated.

“Drive up to the Compound yourself,” he eventually said, chewing the inside of his bottom lip. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Framers are good people, you know, but they are, ah… co-operative.”

Part of me wanted to say, But do they have any expertise?

“What about the locals? What do they think of them?”

A lick-lipping pause.

“The thing you need to understand about Ruddick, Mr. Manning-”

“Disciple,” I interrupted. “Call me Disciple.”

“Sure… er, Disciple, then,” he replied with an embarrassed How- could-that-be-a-name look.

The urge to hit him passed quickly, and not simply because he was a cop. You know the saying: bloody a cop’s nose, break your future’s neck. He was too… well-meaning.

“Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean…”

Ruddick was open for business. I could almost see him sitting with a bunch of Chamber of Commerce fat-asses strategizing around a bucket of KFC. Hell, even cult members make the odd run to the Sam’s Club for toiletries and whatnot. The Enlightened wipe their asses at least as much as the Saved, probably more, given all that hummus.

“But, you know, people…” he added uncomfortably.

“No one much likes them.”

“This is God-fearing country, Disciple.”

He spoke my name as though warming to it, as though realizing it would spike the tedium of his coffee-shop stories.

“And the Framers?” I prompted.

A curious shrug. A guilty shrug. “Well, you know. I don’t want to, you know, stereotype… “

Of course not. That would contradict the police code of honour.

Fawk.

“Not decent folk, huh?”

Nolen grimaced. “Well… Not to sound, ah, er… bigoted or anything, but they are a cult. They have a way of making you forget as much when you’re up there and all… but still…”

I couldn’t resist a winning grin. “They gotta be crazy somehow.”

Another thoughtful pause. “You tell me.” I never did. Nor would I ever. What Albert had told me less than an hour previously about irrational belief had simply confirmed something I had suspected all along. “Crazy” is simply a numbers game. If there were only twenty-seven Roman Catholics in the world, they would be the crazy-ass cult, and people would be wagging their heads about how their symbol is simply an ancient electric chair, or how they pretend to be cannibal vampires once a week, washing down their Maker’s flesh with a gulp of his blood.

Nolen escorted me to the front door, pausing at an office to introduce me to his deputy chief, a dour old law enforcement lifer named Jeff Hamilton. He had the kind of face you see on banknotes from some obscure European country. Shrewd eyes. Buzzed grey hair. Flapjack jowls. He stood, nodded, smiled, and shook my hand with a banker’s choreographed cheer. But something in his look, a kind of Slavic intensity, told me that he disapproved-of me, of Nolen, of his subordinates-that pretty much everything except his wife’s lasagna fell short of his expectations. His office even reeked of cheese.

I would have bet my expenses that he had some kind of contemptuous nickname for Nolen.

I sparked a joint while still parked in the station lot, sat back, and began to review this latest conversation. One statement in particular kept floating back to the harried centre of my attention: “Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean…” Something about the way Nolen had said “anyone”-a kind of grimace in an otherwise avid, even eager expression…

Was it fear? Had the Framers got to him somehow?

Truth was, earnest people had been freaking me out since at least the second grade, when I announced to the entire class that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, that it was all another social control mechanism. Little Phil Barnes told me-with a conviction that would have made a suicide bomber blush-that not believing in Santa was naughty, and that everyone knew what that meant.

He had this list, you see.

I was out-and-out bawling by the time I got home, convinced I had been blacklisted by the fucking fatman. I’ve suffered an irrational fear of Santa ever since. And a deep distrust of honesty.

Decent folk like Phil.

As a cynic, the problem you face with earnest people is pretty much the same problem the British faced with Gandhi. All of our schemes are corrupt in some manner; gaming the system is inked in our DN-fucking-A. And a certain ability to ignore the disconnect between our rhetoric and our actions is all it takes to keep the show running, an instinctive tolerance of ambient hypocrisy. One honest idiot is all it takes to bring it all crashing down-which is why so many honest idiots end up at the bottom of the river, metaphorically or otherwise. Finding strength in your convictions may be good when it comes to independence from colonial rule, but when it comes to the weave of interpersonal schemes that holds offices and families together, it’s nothing short of disastrous.

In a world of funhouse mirrors, it’s the straight reflection that deforms.

“Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community…”

Nolen was going to be a problem. I could feel it in my bones.

I peered across the world beyond my windshield, the world of Ruddick, PA, my thoughts crusting about the rim of innumerable memories. The sun was still high, so that the people I could see had only shadows beneath their brows-no eyes that could be seen. Something about them and the surrounding collection of little buildings, scrubby trees, and cracked sidewalks made me smile.

Fucking small towns, man. You gotta love them. Big enough to pretend. Too small to be.

I cranked the key, listened to my poor old Vee-Dub rattle to diesel life. As I pulled onto Kane Street, one last fragment of my conversation came floating back to awareness.

“No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”

“A gas mask, huh.”

Gas mask, indeed. It was time to meet the Framers. Track Five