R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (24 page)

“No more,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “Not anymore you can’t.”

I reached toward my cousin and he handed me the Crucifix of Ardincaple—my ancestor’s weapon, talisman of the Clan MacAulay for perhaps as many as a thousand years. In my hand, it warmed to the touch. As I raised it toward the sky, it glowed increasingly until it illuminated the entire rooftop.

The gunfire had died down, the demons beaten, and Rule stood statuesque and silent as he waited for the inevitable. The moment had arrived.

The beginning or end of everything.

I then noticed the stars could no longer be seen; a cloud as I’d never witnessed had at some point formed above us, as dark purple as a fresh bruise, with blackened boils and taut swells that looked infected, filled with plagues and threatening to burst. The exterior of the monstrous thing billowed into a macabre musculature that engulfed the sky.

The wind picked up, first swirling randomly, then rotating in a clockwise, circular motion. It gained velocity and strength. The light from the talisman seemed to dissipate, as if in anticipation of the titular moment.

A moment I’d been dreading for too long.

A moment that seared my insides as if lava flowed in my veins.

A moment that was not in question but a necessity of the ages.

The betrayer had to die.

Jax turned toward me. My brother. Or the thing that pretended to be him. Whatever he’d become; whatever Rule and all the Evil in the Universe had conspired to make him, stood not eight feet away.

He stared at me much the way he’d done before in our lives and at that instant—in
that
moment—he looked like my brother. The brother who I’d once loved more than life, than myself, than my father or even my mother.

The brother who, at eight, had been defiled by a
nineteen-year-old
cousin, while I, my brother’s keeper, his older sibling—his protector—hid in the shadows, trembling with a cowardice from which I would spend the rest of my life running.

The brother who saw me hiding in the darkness and never said a word for fear of me being hurt but who never took his stare from my eyes, even as he screamed for help.

This much I had remembered as we talked, driving to the parking garage. But I had not known what it really meant, not until Meyer picked up the talisman of our ancestors; not until I saw that the sword had no use for him.

I turned and drove the blade of the Clan MacAulay deep into Shaw Macaulay’s chest. He howled and I stared into his eyes as I pushed it deeper.

“I know who you
are
,” I said to him, tears still running down my cheeks. “How? Why, you evil fucking bastard?”

Shaw Macaulay didn’t answer me. He couldn’t, not with the blood filling his lungs and the fire of Ardincaple searing through his tendons and bone and flesh.

The furor of wind had grown even louder and had then begun to form an inverted twister, whose force increased exponentially, and yet none of us moved, nor any object—not so much as a dried stick or a piece of dust—was disturbed.

Meyer—Shaw—fell to his knees as the fire consumed him from the inside. He died without a word of remorse or regret but only a frozen look of shock as his own reckoning arrived. And when he (or whatever he was) did die, his evil soul—ephemeral and at the same time translucent and obsidian as the darkest black hole—was sucked clean of his human shell and pulled skyward into the cloud from Hell.

Then the rest followed. All the demons—dead most, but some still clinging to what they thought of as life—were consumed by the whirlwind and whisked away to the imprisonment that awaited them. All this without anything of this world moving an inch.

I looked at Jax just as Rule reached for him but the demon’s hand could not touch him—some un-seeable force kept the demon master away—and a black soul rose, too, from my brother, leaving behind just Jax. He did not die as I had feared but rather dropped down to a knee and covered his face with a thick, callused hand.

Lastly, the cloud, pregnant with malice and evil and all manner of pestilence, finished the taking back of its own.

One more soul to claim.

One last piece of shit to knock the fuck out.

Rule cried out like the ultimate coward he was, but could not be heard as he was drawn like a rocket skyward, spiraling into the maw of eternal nothingness.

I’M NOT sure why I remembered the terrible event that occurred that chill October night when I did. It happened in our backyard, by the garage, but my mind and my guilt buried it so far beneath everything else that it would not playback until years later, I suppose, just when it needed to.

Of course, its very existence inside—the horrible guilt and rage and shame—it fueled me; it was the unknown drive behind likely all I’d accomplished or become since that night. It was the crude oil fuel that raged inside the furnace of my soul and never let me forget my coordinates, my path through my life.

When Shaw Macaulay returned into my life as Meyer West, he looked nothing of the drunken, sadistic, pederast piece of shit that entered our lives back then as quickly as he left. I simply had no memory of him, though had he not changed so much physically, perhaps—

I don’t like the excusatory parlance of Coulda Woulda Shoulda. What we’ve done before—the past—it is not unlike a rearview mirror in comparison to a windshield. We must only check it from time-to-time to verify our bearings, but what lies ahead of us, what spreads out before us in the future, is all we can control.

As I drove Jax to the parking garage that night, I told him I’d remembered, and that it should have been
me
that the monster, Rule, inhabited, and who God forsook. We talked again, like brothers, and he told me there was always something inside him that promised there was a reason and that’s why he stayed quiet all those years, never even asking Paddy about our cousin.

He also told me he’d never forgiven me because there was nothing to forgive. He said all he could think the whole time was that, were it Bobby in his place, Bobby would never want him to expose his hiding place and subject a second child to the cretin Shaw. He said that after all the years of me standing up for my little brother, he made himself into a hero for finally protecting me.

I told him he didn’t “make” himself into anything, that he
was
a hero, but that I should have tried to stop it nonetheless.

Amanda arrived too late, thank God, and my phone I never did find again. Manny’s people—those who survived—buried their own and I heard from my partner that church attendance was up so high that new buildings were breaking ground soon.

I don’t know what the other officers and agents thought. We sure as hell didn’t talk about it. Over the months, even the whispers disappeared altogether.

Spencer Grant’s body was discovered and enough DNA evidence, possessions of the victims, computer files, and a daily diary of his actions, feedings, and kills, to close the Judas case. But there was still the matter of the murdered woman in the clothing store in Littleton. The two remaining witnesses refused to cooperate, afraid of the killer’s threats against their families. They were shown pictures of Grant and they said that was not the murderer.

I don’t know for certain who killed that poor woman. When I say that, of course I am saying it as the random detective who has not been assigned to the case and has, at best, circumstantial knowledge of particular facts. The department has decided that without the eyewitness testimony, no useable DNA processed from the crime scene, and in my opinion a general distaste for attempting any legal proceedings tied to alleged facts and circumstances outside the realm of normalcy where a jury would be very likely to find reasonable doubt, has decided to place the case in the cold file status.

Jax has a very devoid memory of anything after our trip into the Idaho wilderness. I don’t know if or when it will ever return to him. I pray it never does. I’ve had to explain to him that his wife moved on two years prior and remarried, having grieved for eight years. His daughters are in college, having accepted the death of their father a long time ago. For now the plan is for Jax to stay with us until he figures out what he wants to do. I know some less-than-thoroughly-honest people who nonetheless make the best fake identification I’ve ever seen.

Another strange leftover from his adventure is that Jax has new fingerprints. I can’t explain it, nor do I want to. Given half the chance I would wake up from the past ten years and but for the triplets, Amanda, and Granger, erase it away.

But the world doesn’t work that way, does it? There is no light without darkness. No joy without sorrow. No rich when there are no poor. And if we are to have any good in the world it stands to reason that there
will
be evil to counterbalance the Universe.

It’s why I became a cop. I make the differences I’m able to make, from sucker-punching a lesser boxer so that he places his ego in check and becomes a better cop (and lives longer) to looking the other way when my brain wants to put together two and two and come up with a 2006 Ford Explorer, found with stolen license plates—one that a witness saw drive away from the murder scene and who described a familiar face to a sketch artist.

There come moments in every life where priorities cry to be shifted, when a man or woman must look into their core and come away with an answer with which they can live. Too often, however, something that can be tolerated in the present festers over the years until it becomes something too cancerous to contain.

Which oath supersedes which? How far do our earthly commitments push us toward decisions that affect things like family and what exactly does justice look like, other than a blind, shape-shifting temptress, at best?

Em, well, she’s recovering. Slowly. She still holds on to my badge. Cleaves to it, actually. I ordered another one. Shackleford is much more like himself these days and harassed me ruthlessly, as if I were a rookie who didn’t know his ass from his ear.

Em is also remembering more and more about Idaho. She’s lost her stomach for wanting to return there, though I’ve promised her whenever that changes—and I am certain it will—that I will take her there myself and that it will, despite her fears, be a healing experience.

The biggest news is, after getting the okay from Amanda, I asked Em if she would do us the honor of living with us until she gets her GED, picks a college, and allowing us to help her pay for it and get her life started in the direction it should have in the beginning, before the horror, before the unraveling of the plausible.

She said yes, but only if we would adopt her and change her last name to Macaulay. I had planned to broach that subject, too, and was happy that it was what Em wanted. I hadn’t been lying to her in the woods when I told her I meant to protect her as my own daughters.

Of course there was a hitch. There’s always a hitch when women are involved. They see things clearer than do we cavemen.

“You know she’s too attached to you,” Amanda reminded me when I told her. “I’m certain I don’t need to quote the psychological profiling of a million rescued hostages to you.”

I said I didn’t care. That Em, like everyone else, would heal, and that as far as I was concerned, she was our daughter now and the rest of it was just shit you deal with when you have children. Amanda agreed, of course. She loves Em, too, and like me is heartbroken that such a wonderful child (and now young woman) should face life alone.

I also shared my plans of retirement with my wife and told her she better start looking for a more challenging job in the Bureau. I’m pretty sure that made the adoption thing go over a little more smoothly, although I don’t think Amanda really wants me to retire if that’s what it takes to get back to doing what she loves.

In all honesty I’m on the fence. I love being a cop and I don’t know what else I could do, even just for fun. I have my twenty years in, so the pension will be there. But as some believe, the minimum is never enough.

J. Lubbock once said:

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

I don’t mind watching a cloud or two, nor listening to the murmur of a stream, but lying down reminds me too much of green pastures.

And then I start thinking about the valley of the shadow of death.

The world needs shepherds.