Penitence & Therapy pt6

A sound like a gentle rush of steam from a breached pipe, slowly filling the air with humidity and heat. A sound that announced some imminent, turgid thought about to issue forth from between the teeth that made the sound a sigh by the pernicious act of holding in a soul crushing groan.

“I’m still really pissed off that my lead didn’t come through.” Harvey said, grinding his molars.

This was the present.

A time in which a thing merely is.

Trey, however, was still preening his nails.

If you want to sponsor my writing of Penitence & Therapy, please click here.
“Tell me about it,” he groaned, releasing the full displeasure that weighed against his own mind and his own conclusion, well thought out and played to the hilt, had simply been wrong. Being wrong was a devastating blow to Trey, and it was not something he enjoyed. His enjoyment was oft found in others being wrong, and then watching them attempt to extricate themselves from the mess that they had simply made. It was a lucky thing for his own ego that there wasn’t a mess that had been made by this assumption, nor some squalid pile of detritus as an outcome from which he needed to lithely pull himself free from, like a survivor from a building that had collapsed under the weight of its own grandiose architecture after a plane loaded with full had crashed into its supporting columns, spewing forth sun hot fire that simply liquefied anything metallic in its path and vapourised anything made of a less dense substance.

He felt lucky that he did not have this monumental fuck up to get out of.
But it did not stop the nagging doubts at edges of his own mind about the fact that he had simply been wrong.

“I was certain we were going to find some Mexican behind it.” Trey continued.
“Well, it was a pretty good idea at the time. Cactuses equal South America, and south america equals Mexicans.” Harvey rolled his eyes, fully aware of the bigotry in his statement. It was meant to be funny, a joke shared between comrades, and under more normal circumstances, or at least as normal as the two could muster, it may have actually hit home.

It didn’t.

It missed the mark in slow motion. In a predictable way that Harvey could see would fail before he even managed to get to the second “equals”, but could not stop the speeding train, soon to be wreck, of thought from using his motor cortex to control his mouth and make him spew for the the offending sounds that Trey’s cochlea would then pickup and find distasteful, in turn be adjusted, filtered, understood, and then create a reaction of turning Trey’s head in Harvey’s direction to provide a downward curvature of his mouth with a slightly raised edge of an eyebrow which Harvey would then interpret as a grimacing look of disdain.

He felt the way William Tell had in the oft untold tale of when he missed the apple by a few centimeters.

It had been the kind of week that basically drove one into a lackadaisical pit of despair.

They had decided to chase up the idea that perhaps their perpetrator had been some kind of bizarre southern American psychopath, either connected to some bizarre cult like offshoot of the Latin Catholicism or a 2012 doomsday cultist. Even a small time drug operation would have satisfied either of them, as it was fairly certain that all three victims thus far had been wrapped up in their own little habit.
The first idea turned up lacking, mostly because it was soon abandoned. Neither of them had the faintest idea of how to follow up a supposition like that, let alone execute some sort of information gathering operation. What’s more, the idea of some freshly arrived migrant going on a religious killing spree seemed far too much like a cheap horror movie. The kind with gift-store masks and the knives you buy at camping stores. In so far as either of them could tell, whoever had done these killings had done so without the aid of such a weapon. The grim pictures on the wall didn’t indicate the clean cuts you’d expect from a quality camping knife. The victims were torn and wounded deeply. A knife made of chiseled bone perhaps.

They’d asked a few of the more research oriented officers around them to keep an eye out for anything that might possibly relate to a doomsday cult springing up. If the premise of the cult wasn’t to separate fools from their coin, and had some genuine religious ideology behind it, it was often a migrant that brought it with them. Locals had simply become too lazy, too apathetic, too much in love with themselves and materialism, to see much into the spiritual anymore. It wasn’t a loss that Harvey or Trey cared for, or even though about, much, but it was one that gave a definite gut feeling that a cult would not be a local phenomenon.

This left the drugs angle. An angle that any good cop finds juicy, and easiest to get their superiors to throw resources behind. Drug busts made for good headlines, and good headlines made for more money in the coffers, and that meant better… something. One assumed it meant an improvement in the standards of policing, but the assumption was generally wrong. The money got spent on the sorts of things that were desperately needed to keep the office going, like air conditioner repairs, and oversized cakes for strippers to burst forth from when senior officers retired. The sorts of things that ensured that police didn’t take their standard issue .38 S&W 10 revolvers, stuff it in their own mouths, angle the barrel up to about forty-five degrees and pull the trigger.

Whilst the offices could use a fresh coat of paint, mottled beige and red was generally not the colour most people found soothing, or even correctly suggested by the departments own internal style guide.

So they had played Cops and Dealers that week, starting with jokes about the paperwork required for emotionally firing into the air pointlessly as perpetrators escaped, or of leaping through their firing guns akimbo and how if they tried that in real life, the kickback would snap their wrists like twigs, leaving them in curled up balls of writhing agony by the time they hit the floor, and never mind about the laughing narcotics purveyors who would then proceed to viciously kick them until they shat blood. The mental image was only made hilarious by the process of substituting their own shattered and wrecked bodies for those of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. The comedic duo had never been funnier. It stopped being funny when they thought about how a lot of drug cartels often enjoyed pulling people’s teeth with pliers.

Harvey had a recurring dream about pliers and his own teeth. Sometimes they were pulled while he could do nothing to prevent it. The worst ones were when he pulled the teeth himself, feeling the tearing pain as he slowly, purposefully twisted his own as the pulp inside the enamel was slowly, excruciatingly torn away from the blood vessel and nerve. He’d wake up moaning in pain as the memory lingered, totally disoriented and covered in his own cloying, stinking fear sweat.

No, it simply stopped being funny in that initial car trip on their first lead. It also put Harvey in a combative mood, a foreshadow of the entire week, that probably did them no favours with their informants.

But they spoke with known underworld figures. Unsurprisingly, none would admit to new hires. What was surprising is that none knew about the murders. Homicide was something that was zealously guarded by such groups. Whilst they were also of the belief that only the State should have the authority to grant or take life, sometimes, they were also of the belief that the State wasn’t going to do the job. Especially as there was no capital punishment. They were of the belief that sometimes the State needed help in doing the right thing, and within their own little circles, were often quite proud, recanting the details of each particular act of State-assisting justice to their own inner circle of confidants. That the details of these particular homicides shocked them at all, let alone horrified some, was testament enough that they knew nothing themselves.

A weak week.

Spread the hate