“Man’s Inhumanity to man is only surpassed
by his cruelty to animals.” –George Bernard Shaw
Phillip Eastman tried not to give in to the impulse to smack the sides of his head rapidly with the flats of his hands, an old habit that used to take hold of him whenever his frustration level got too far out of his range of self-control. He paced, hands cinched firmly on his hips as a wordless noise rumbled up and down his throat, a kind of animal snarling that maintained a low buzz. His antiperspirant was being pressed to the edge of its ability to keep his underarms dry, thanks to a combination of his offices’ A/C being on the fritz, his heavy charcoal gray suit coat, and his rising temper.
“So, let me get this straight,” he said through clenched teeth, finally ceasing in his rapid pacing for long enough to look up at the uniformed police woman standing near the door of his personal office. “You’re thinking that a handful of your people, who have spent the last six months or so following Tapper and his little buddies here, have made a mistake? Of the sort that’s going to end up with this whole case getting thrown out?”
“It isn’t what anyone was hoping to have happen, sir, but I got word from some of my colleagues in the Anti-Crime Unit that they caught wind of another event set up for last night. They swept in, but someone was smart enough to set up lookouts around the area, and all the trainers and handlers got out before they could get grabbed. They ended up grabbing a few of the people just watching and betting, and three of them separately said after a little questioning that Tapper’s just a high-roller type, gambles a lot on the fights, but isn’t involved any more than that.” The uniformed woman shrugged, a large gesture, given her imposing build. “A lot of folks were suspicious about him and his buddies not being there to begin with, too.”
Eastman, an assistant district attorney for the city, let out a sigh of frustration, shaking his head. “Our case against him was already circumstantial, shaky. With this,” he said with a snort, moving back around behind his desk. He practically dropped into chair, all the wind gone from his sails. “My boss is gonna tell me we gotta drop the charges.”
“It isn’t like there was no good reason to have him in the pool of suspects, sir,” the officer, her name tag identifying her as ‘S. Kitridge’. “He did used to be a handler.” Eastman used one hand to rub at his temple, grumbling, and with his other hand, flapped the officer toward the office door.
“Go on, Sally. Oh, but before you go,” he added, sitting up and giving her half a grin. “Why the hell are you in uniform? I thought detectives only put them on for ceremonial functions.”
“Department’s a little short-handed street-side, so I put on the old monkey suit one day a week for overtime purposes,” the tall policewoman replied. “It’s good to remind myself where I come from, too.” She opened the door of his office, donned the heavy black leather hat of her profession, and headed out, leaving ADA Eastman with an awkward and unpleasant phone call to make from the official office phone. He picked up the handset, dialed the number for the city’s holding center, and proceeded to have a conversation with the administrator there that pained him.
An hour and a half later, Steven Christopher Tapper and his two companions were released back onto the streets of Amelia City.
**
Steve Tapper didn’t cut the most imposing silhouette one had ever seen, but he didn’t have to. He possessed a reputation among some of the less-reputable circles of the region that made up for his lack of obvious physical presence, and generally speaking, most folks tended to hesitate to mess with someone with ears that looked like his, sometimes referred to as ‘cauliflower ears’, or a scar like the one he wore along his right cheek. Puckered and slightly paler even than the rest of his face, Tapper’s right cheek had once been caught in the jaws of a mindlessly vicious Rottweiler that had identified him as a viable target for attack. The dog had latched on to his face and begun shaking its head back and forth, trying to ragdoll the average-sized man, but Tapper had held his ground, reaching into the back of his belt for the hunting knife he had kept there since his days in the Eagle Scouts as a kid.
Tapper hadn’t made a sound as he used one hand to keep the dog’s head in place against his face, the other hand stabbing up into the animal’s throat repeatedly. When it had finally let him go, he had simply wiped the blade off on his pants, told his buddies Jim and Phil to bury the dog, and walked away to arrange for the evening’s next fight. There was money to be made, after all, and they had plenty more dogs to chose from to train up and set after one another. Dozens of degenerate gamblers had watched as Tapper, bleeding from tooth puncture marks along his face, calmly collected what he was owed from the event’s book keepers, and handed a portion of those winnings to the dead dog’s handler.
“Steve, what’s this for,” the man had asked, flabbergasted. “The fuckin’ dog coulda’ killed you!”
“Yeah, but it didn’t,” Tapper replied coldly, reaching into one of his pockets and pulling out a handkerchief, which he folded and held up against his cheek. “And now I’ve ruined your possible earning for the rest of the night by killing it. Fair’s fair.” Since that evening, Steve Tapper had come to be referred to in his particular circuits as a stony kind of bastard, not to be lightly trifled with. Standing out in front of the holding center with Jim and Phil flanking him on either side, he looked like nothing less than a minor league crime boss, but in simple blue collar clothes.
The white Escalade that pulled up in front of him lowered its passenger-side window, a man with a face like a tomato with lips pushing his head partway out. “Hop on in, Tapper,” the tomato-man said, his affect skirting the line of stereotypical Italian. “Yous two shmucks too,” the man added with a head-juke toward the more powerfully built Jim and Phil. Once all three were settled in the back seat, the large SUV rolled away, heading off for who knew where.
Tapper sat just behind the driver’s seat, trying not to wrinkle his nose at the driver’s excessive application of cologne. These were not the sort of people you openly showed distaste or displeasure toward, after all, and the man seated in the third row behind himself and his boys was undoubtedly scoping out the rearview mirror at the front, checking for Tapper’s expression. “You’re very fortunate to have the connections you have in the police department, Mr. Tapper,” the voice behind him rumbled. “Are you worried at all that they might be burned?”
“For now, no,” Tapper replied evenly, looking out the window, noting that they had turned onto County Road 9, heading north. “But the three of us are going to have to move operations for the time being to our secondary location.”
“I had assumed that was likely going to be your next move. We’re taking you up that way now.”
“That’s appreciated, sir.”
“It’s the least we could do, considering you made these arrangements almost half a year ago. I like the foresight that demonstrated, Mr. Tapper. You’re sure you don’t want to come inside yet,” the man in the back row asked, one thick hand settling heavy on Tapper’s left shoulder from behind. “We could make good use of a man of your obvious talents.”
“I thank you for the offer, sir, but no, not as yet,” Tapper replied, trying not to think about what had happened years earlier to Billy Rowan and his crew; he’d heard all sorts of horror stories about how they had turned out. The assumption, a fair one at that, had been that the man in the back seat of the Escalade had been perturbed by Rowan’s displays of disrespect, his failure to acknowledge the chain of command in Amelia City’s underworld. Operating as he did on the outskirts of that world, Tapper was content for the time being to remain on the fringes. “We’ve not yet established our particular trade firmly enough around the area for my liking. Perhaps once we have some events in Candleton and East Perry.” The hand on his shoulder patted him slowly, twice, and withdrew.
“A wise if somewhat conservative approach for a man of your youth, Mr. Tapper. I can appreciate your position, your caution.”
“I also know that some of your associates disapprove of my operation, sir,” Tapper added, swallowing hard. There were nothing but stretches of dense woodland visible out his window now; if the Escalade slowed down, pulled over, he knew it would mean that he, Jim and Phil had been deemed too troublesome to let continue taking in oxygen. He was taking a gamble right now, refusing the offer before him. “Dog fighting isn’t exactly a classy way of earning.”
“Fuck classy,” the man in the rear of the vehicle said with a half-snort, half-chuckle. “Money’s money, Mr. Tapper, and how it gets gained is hardly a concern of mine. Yes, there are lines one does not cross, but lettin’ a few mutts bloody each other up ain’t one of ‘em.” The vehicle continued on, and soon enough, Tapper saw a sign offering welcome to North Perry, an Amelia City suburb, population 67,000. After a few minutes, the Escalade came to a hold at a traffic light, and the man in the rear row asked, “Any particular spot in town here you want us to drop you and your friends off, Mr. Tapper?”
“Quinn’s Diner, actually, if that’s good,” Tapper said, feeling a lot more at ease now. His gamble had paid off, after all.
“More than good,” said the man in the rear row. “Whoever they’ve got in that kitchen in the mornings, he makes a mean hollandaise sauce. If you haven’t tried it, you must give it a shot, Mr. Tapper.”
“I’m partial to their Mountain Man Platter myself,” Jim offered, the first words he’d spoken in almost three days. Tapper kept Jim around mostly because the guy could rip a cook book in half without even flinching, and he’d proven his capacity for violence on more than a few occasions. About as much brain power as one of the mutts we toss in the ring, but just as vicious, Tapper often thought. When the big man spoke, though, it was usually something along these lines, some innocuous observation that seemed to add to casual conversations without really meaning much.
Five minutes later, the Escalade pulled into the small lot of an old train car that had been outfitted and modified into a 50’s style diner, with a sign on top that dubbed it ‘Quinn’s Diner’, and a little ‘24/7’ sign beside it. Underneath the numbers was a little addition, which read, ‘No Major Holidays’. The driver and second tough from the front passenger seat clambered out, opening the rear doors for Tapper, Jim and Phil to clamber out, their dark gray suits and wraparound sunglasses distinctly out of place in the suburban diner parking lot.
“Thanks, fellahs,” Tapper said to the driver, who nodded and climbed back in. The passenger thug came around the vehicle with a duffel bag in hand, the very same one that Tapper had brought to the man in the rear row of the Escalade half a year earlier, but much lighter now. Tapper unzipped the bag, looking in and eyeballing the remaining rolls of cash, the two firearms and spare magazines, and the nondescript Altoids mints tin with the pair of keys rattling around inside. He zipped it back up after procuring a roll of bills and pocketing it, handed the bag to Jim, and nodded to the suited muscle. “Thanks again.”
“Boss says to be careful,” the thug cautioned, looking around the area slowly. “There’s been some weird shit going on around this town lately.”
“What kind of weird shit?”
“Amelia City weird shit,” the muscle said, clearing his throat. “You know the kind. Says you should keep your head down for a few days, let things blow over.” Tapper nodded, hitched up his pants a little, and started leading Jim and Phil toward the diner’s entrance. The Escalade backed out of its spot, and gently rolled away, leaving the trio to their devices.
Soon after, Tapper thought the man from the rear row of the vehicle had been quite right; the cook here made one hell of a hollandaise.
**
Tapper tilted his head slightly to the left, eyeballing the massive animal critically. “You’re sure he’s gonna be up for this? I mean, no offense, pally, but he ain’t even barked at us since we showed up.” Phil had reached out to an old friend to see if he might be interested in participating in the circuit, since the guy had always been interested in raising and training dogs, mostly serving as a freelance obedience trainer for other private owners. Now, Tapper and Phil stood just beyond this specimen’s chain range, considering it from a safe distance.
“He’s a solid mutt, don’t make a lot of noise, sure, but if I say the right thing, he’s gonna try to break this chain of his to get at you,” said the dog’s owner, a scraggly man in loose camo pants and a black long sleeve thermal shirt. Behind him stood his modest dwelling, a one-story rambler on the eastern outskirts of town, his nearest neighbors a solid half a mile away. A large fenced enclosure hosted half a dozen other dogs, all of them also mutts, but most of them seemed largely harmless from the looks of them.
“You got entry,” Tapper asked. The owner pulled a wad of bills from his back pocket and offered it to him, and Tapper nodded. Phil took the money and pocketed it. “Good. Scrap yard, Saturday night, 9 o’clock. Don’t be late, and have the dog in a crate. What’s his name?” Tapper pulled out a small Moleskine pocket notebook from his own rear pocket, along with a pen, and turned to the marked page, where seven other owner and dog pairings had been written down.
“Parker,” said the owner, at which the dog turned its snout up toward him. Tapper wrote down, ‘Finnegan-Parker’, clicked the pen, and replaced it and the notebook back into his pocket.
“All right. If anything changes, Phil here will give you a call. Saturday, then.” He turned and started walking away with Phil.
“You sure the scrap yard’s a good spot, man,” Finnegan asked when they were a few yards away. “I’ve heard some weird shit about that place.” Tapper just grinned over his shoulder as he replied.
“This is Amelia County, that describes about fifty percent of the area,” he quipped. When they got back to the car, a 2015 Camry that had been registered and insured in Phil’s name a couple of years earlier as a ‘go-to’ vehicle for their operations in North Perry, should the need ever arise, Tapper scoffed. “I hate it when people assume I’m unfamiliar with all the folk tales get told around here.”
“It’s no offense, I’m sure, Chris,” Phil said, starting the car. “But you’re not from here; you don’t know what it can be like sometimes.”
“I’ve lived here long enough to know,” Tapper replied. “Especially nine years back, on Christmas Eve? All those explosions and shit downtown? People talking about seeing some kind of monsters when they looked outside? And then what happened a few days later, Phil?”
“Contaminated water supply,” Phil said with a shake of his head.
“Contaminated water supply, right. People seeing shit because they got inadvertently drugged out of their heads, mass hysteria kind of thing,” Tapper said with a chuckle. Phil handed him the money from his back pocket before pulling out of the driveway, heading back for their place. “You ever see anything like that?” Phil didn’t immediately reply, seeming to mull the question over for a few minutes.
“Not personally, no,” he said finally, his tone somewhere between recall and confusion. “But I had a couple of buddies some years back, used to sling dope here, in town. Mostly to high school kids, just pot and beer, nothing too harsh, you know? But every now and then, they’d sell something a little stronger.”
“Okay.”
“Well, one day, they turn up dead. From what I hear, they looked like they got ripped apart by some kind of bear or something, just torn to pieces.”
“There are a lot of wooded stretches around this town, Phil.”
“Sure, yeah, but when was the last time you ever heard of a bear traipsing into a junkyard,” Phil asked, turning into their neighborhood. “The same said junkyard we’re having the first show at, by the by?”
“Seriously?”
“No shittin’, Chris,” Phil said, slowing down so that they wouldn’t call any extra attention to themselves. Given that Jim alone had an actual, on-the-books job as cover, they didn’t need to get pulled over and be introduced to the local flavor of law enforcement native to North Perry. “I grew up in this town, got a buddy who sometimes gets parts for his garage at that place. He says he once went to pull a sound system out of a junker there, and found somebody’s severed hand in it, just laying there plain as day, right on the passenger seat.”
“Well, it’s a good thing it ain’t people we got fighting on Saturday then, isn’t it,” Chris replied, getting out of the car as Phil killed the engine in front of their rented two-story Cape Cod.
**
Tapper watched with the cold, clinical detachment that he always cloaked himself in when running these events, witnessing the raw, brutal savagery down in the middle of the makeshift arena. Blood flew and guttural snarls filled the air along with the hooting and hollering of the gathered crowd, the two dogs vying not just for their meals, but for their very lives. At the end of the evening’s festivities, only one of the eight canine contestants would be alive, while seven would have to be disposed of. Thankfully, this location lent itself to a simplification of the process; Jim had already identified a likely spot just a few dozen yards where they could deposit the fallen animals.
The big man came into view in Tapper’s peripheral vision in the middle of the third contest, pushing some strange little man in front of him along the back side of the crowd. The stranger appeared to be a scrawny sort, dressed in a manner that made him stand out quite a bit from the other folks gathered round; he wore a faded gray suit, horn-rimmed spectacles, and trousers that looked like they had been new perhaps around the time Chris had been born some twenty-five years earlier. Jim gave the newcomer one last shove, causing the man to stumble up to a spot a few feet away from Chris.
“Spotted this guy over near the fence, up on a stack of old cars,” Jim thundered, keeping a few paces back of the late-middle-aged man in the glasses and suit. “He had these,” the muscle added, holding up a pair of what looked like high-powered binoculars.
“Nobody catches the show free of charge, pally,” Chris said with a wolf’s smile. “Especially not somebody who don’t look like he belongs here. What’s your story?”
“I live around here,” the suit answered evenly, adjusting himself and brushing off his lap; he appeared to have taken a fall at some point between being caught and then hauled over to Chris’s spot on the outskirts of the action. “And I had heard some talk about some kind of illicit event taking place here tonight, chatter among my students.”
“Students? You a teacher in town,” Tapper inquired, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, inhaling slowly.
“I am a professor at Amelia State,” the older man said, his voice aiming for dignity, though there was a slight thread of concern woven into it, a tone Chris well recognized.
“What do you teach there, professor?”
“Mythology and comparative religious studies,” the educator replied. “I had not wanted to believe that such barbaric practices as this could be found here, but I now see that I was mistaken. I must request that you put a stop to it.” Tapper let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh, shaking his head.
“Wow, prof, just wow,” he said between snickers. “You ‘request’ it? Really? And why should I do that? You have any idea what kind of money’s floating around here right now?”
“I can pay you,” the older man said evenly. “If money is all you require to put a stop to this blight, I shall meet the demand, and then some.” The professor stood straighter, and for a moment, Tapper admired the man’s resolve. There was no way he was going to make a deal with the guy, but there was something that could not be denied about the man’s courage, naïve though it might have been.
“I tell you what, professor,” Tapper said, finally turning away bodily from the arena, where the next fight was being set up. “You seem like a pretty brave guy, brave enough certainly to stand here and think I’m gonna let you talk me into putting a stop to the show. But this thing’s already in motion, you see? These people? They’re here for entertainment, and to try and make a few bucks on the wagers. It ain’t my place to take that away from them. Jim?” The big man looming behind the professor quirked an eyebrow at his boss. “Get him out of here, and make sure to impress upon him the importance of his keeping quiet about what he saw tonight.”
“Got it, boss man,” the muscle said, clamping one huge hand on the professor’s shoulder before hauling him away. Tapper returned his attention to the arena, and settled in for the rest of the evening’s sport.
**
Tapper leaned against the car, checking the clock display on his phone once more, casting about for any sign of him. “When was the last time you saw him,” he asked Phil, who sat on the hood of the Camry, playing a game on his own phone to kill time.
“When he was pushing around some scrawny guy away from the ring,” Phil replied without looking up. “Just before the second round.” Tapper grunted, thinking back on the professor. Had things gone south with the old-timer? Was Jim busy trying to find a good place to put a body now? His phone had gone straight to voicemail, which wasn’t a good sign, but they didn’t have all night to wait on the muscle-bound mouth breather to come back to the car.
“Let’s go take a quick look for him,” Tapper said, pushing away from the car. Phil led the way, proving knowledgeable about the general layout of the scrap yard, shining the light from his phone here and there to look for some sign of their cohort. Coming around a curve in a path composed of mostly abandoned and broken furniture, he and Tapper came up short, a gasp choking its way out of Phil’s throat as he shone his light upon an old standing wardrobe, its doors long since broken off.
They found Jim, or what remained of him at least, crammed into the wardrobe, his eyes rolled up into his head, his face lumpy and swollen, as if he’d been mercilessly beaten. A row of hypodermic needles had been shoved into his left arm, plungers all pushed in, the fingers appearing to have been blown off by some kind of firework. “What the fuck,” Tapper rasped, shaking his head. Phil vomited explosively off to one side, and Tapper kicked at the back of his legs. “The hell are you doing, you dope? You want to leave your DNA all over this place for the police to scoop up if they should find him like this? Come on, we gotta get the hell out of here,” he said, stomping over toward the wardrobe.
“What are you doing,” Phil managed to ask, wiping his mouth. Tapper grasped one side of the wardrobe, trying with all his might to push the thing forward onto its front, to at least cover the body from open view. When Phil caught on to what he was doing, he came over, and with their combined effort, they were able to topple the wardrobe, Jim’s body hitting the ground with a sickening wet slapping noise under the wooden enclosure that was now his tomb.
“Let’s go,” Tapper said, and he and Phil half-ran back to the car, pelting away from the North Perry Scrap Yard.
**
“Lucky thing you remembered what the guy said he taught,” Sally Kitridge said, seated at Tapper’s small kitchen table a few days later with her notebook laid open in front of her. She took a sip of coffee, looked back and forth from Phil to Tapper. “But I gotta tell you, Chris, there’s a lot about this situation that doesn’t make a bit of sense.” She shook her head, scooted forward, and looked down at her handwritten notes, proceeding to read from them. “’Leonard Corvus, lives right here in North Perry, has been a Professor of Mythology and Comparative Religions at Amelia State since 2007. He has had two speeding tickets in fifteen years, pays his taxes, no other public complaints on his record. Born in 1972 to one Robert and Elaine Corvus at Amelia Memorial Hospital, went to Boston College in 1990, then to Oxford in 1995. Came home to the States and started teaching high school shortly upon return at North Perry Central in 2000, then got invited to start his own course work at Amelia State in 2007. One weird thing, though,” Kitridge said, flipping to her second page of notes. “Seems like an unsettlingly high number of folks who spend time with the professor end up either dead, or living out their days up at Ravenwood Manor.”
“The loony bin north of the city?” Tapper sniffed, poured himself a cup of coffee on the other side of the kitchen, and spooned in a liberal helping of sugar. “What, his lectures are so boring that people go batshit?” This elicited a snort of laughter from Phil, but Detective Kitridge just gave the pair a sour half-lidded stare.
“I’m just saying, this Corvus guy seems to drag a tail of trouble around behind him sometimes. Since he started teaching, twenty-three students he’s instructed have ended up committed to the asylum, all on an involuntary basis. He also has had three of his personal physicians die on him, and most recently, a psychiatrist he had an appointment with turned up dead, all in very bizarre circumstances. And that,” she said, tapping her notebook for emphasis with her pen, “brings us to your friend James Tillman.”
“How do you mean,” Tapper asked, sitting across from her at the small kitchen table.
“According to our guy in the morgue, your buddy died of a massive coronary, brought on by an enormous overdose of anabolic steroids; that’s what was in those needles jabbed all the way up his arm. Now, did you know your buddy was juicing?”
“It wasn’t exactly a trade secret, Sal,” Tapper half-snarled. “Guy doesn’t get that big by eating the kind of horseshit food Jim was always horking down, gym or no gym. But it ain’t like he just carried a bunch of hypes around wit’ ‘im.” Tapper shook his head, let out a sigh.
“I’m just doing what you asked me to do, finding out about this guy you think offed your muscle,” she said, clapping the notebook shut. “So, unless you have something sweet for me, I’ve got real work to go do.” Tapper put out a hand quickly over hers, and nodded to Phil. Phil stalked over to the fridge, taking down a box of plain Cheerios, handing the box over to Tapper. Tapper took a roll of bills out of it, handing the box back to Phil, and offered it to the detective. “What do you want for this,” Sally asked, putting out her hand for the cash.
“Keep an eye on our educator friend, maybe dig a little deeper into his background, stuff you won’t find on a standard background check,” Tapper said. “He may not seem like much on the surface, but as Phil here and Jim always used to tell me, around Amelia, you can never trust surface looks, eh?” Sally gave him a tight-lipped look and a very slight nod; she knew exactly what he meant by that, given all that she had seen in her time serving in law enforcement in and around Amelia County. “How long will that get me?” Sally took the rubber band off of the wad of cash, counted it, and tucked it into her coat pocket.
“Ten days, or two weeks, depending on whether or not I’m feeling generous,” she replied finally.
“Check in with me every two or three days,” he said quickly. She nodded, already knowing the routine.
“You putting together another show already for next week?”
“That’s the plan,” Tapper replied.
“Don’t use the scrap yard again,” Sally said, getting up and swigging down the rest of her coffee quickly. “I got word from the circuit that patrols are going to be poking around there a little more for the time being, but it’ll trail off eventually. This isn’t the first body they’ve found out there, after all.” Tapper offered no other comment before she left, though in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but feel that if the detective had intended this observation to be a comfort, she had absolutely failed in the effort.
**
Finnegan turned out to be quite the useful resource for Chris Tapper and his operation. Not only was he ready, willing and able to bring another dog to a second round of fights, but in lieu of paying the normal entry fee for the circuit this time around, he informed Tapper that the show could be held right there on his very private property, well secured away from prying eyes on the outskirts of town. Heading away from the scraggly young man’s property and back towards their place a couple of days after having had his pow-wow with Detective Kitridge, he pulled out his phone, signaling for Phil to turn down the car’s stereo system, and he called Sally’s number. When the line just rang and rang with no answer, and no prompt to leave a message, he shook his head. It wasn’t like her to not at least message him that she was too busy to take a call, and this was the fifth time he had tried to contact her since morning.
“We gotta make a side trip, Phil,” he told his only remaining lieutenant in the operation, giving him the address and settling back in his seat, putting in an ear bud so that he could listen to a podcast on the drive. The trip took a little under half an hour, and though he didn’t like coming back into the main city of Amelia itself even for a short visit at the time, Tapper considered it a necessary evil; one did not simply invest in bribing a cop without checking in on that investment now and again. When Phil parked in front of Sally Kitridge’s apartment complex, though, Tapper caught a sour taste in his mouth at the sight of the brick façade of the structure. Strange cabalistic symbols had been spray painted in numerous spots, including one that was distinctly local to Amelia City and its surrounding suburbs, a symbol of a set of four hooked blue claws, joined along their rounded tops by a thin black horizontal line. Whenever he had seen that image, it gave him the shivers.
“Come on,” he said to Phil.
“You don’t want me to wait in the car?”
“I don’t want to go in there alone,” Tapper admitted in a half-whisper. It was curious, he thought, that although it was barely past noon, the city seemed almost dark at midday. He and Phil approached the building as casually as they could, sweeping inside and then heading right up the stairwell just inside the front entrance to the second level, the carpeting underfoot dingy, cheap. As they got to the detective’s unit door, 202, Tapper felt his arms break out in gooseflesh, as if he were standing mere inches away from a live electrical wire. He tried knocking on the door, but the moment his hand contacted the outer surface, the door swung open on Sally Kitridge’s apartment living room.
Sometimes, we as human beings cannot, despite the deep, primal desire to do so, issue forth any noise when we encounter something so outlandish and horrific that it turns the stomach into a boiling cauldron of stomach acid and cause the sphincter to clench up like quick-dry cement. This phenomenon, colloquially referred to as being ‘scared stiff’, is referred to in the medical community as a ‘catatonic moment’. It was just such a moment that both Tapper and Phil experienced as they beheld the sight of Detective Sally Kitridge in her living room, in her current state.
The detective lay sprawled out in the wreckage of what looked like it had once been a quite splendid glass and oak coffee table in the center of the room, the front of her body studded with what looked, at first glance, like some sort of collection of tiny metal throwing stars or shuriken, but which all glinted with the kind of steely metallic sheen reserved for objects to be displayed, not used in combat. Her body lay in a gelid pool of her own blood and broken glass, the fluid around her wounds already brackish and thick-looking with the passage of time.
“Jesus wept,” Phil rasped, taking a couple of hesitant steps into the apartment and crouching down near the dead woman’s feet, tilting his head this way and that to contemplate the scene more closely. His gaze moved slowly up her body, which Tapper at first felt disgusted by, until he realized that the man was counting. When he was done, Phil nodded, came back to Tapper, and pulled the apartment door slowly shut, using a handkerchief to carefully wipe any prints off the knob and the door where Chris had tapped on it, just in case.
“What the fuck happened here,” Tapper half-whispered, finally identifying the odor that had been coming from inside the apartment; like most folks who die violently and suddenly, Sally Kitridge had voided her bladder and bowels in the moment of her demise.
“I don’t know, Chris. But whoever did her like that, they used thirty silver coins to do it. We gotta get out of here.” When the duo was back on the road toward their place in North Perry, Phil displayed for Tapper a peek into his lack of historical knowledge. “That meant something back there, didn’t it? The coins, I mean,” he asked of Tapper.
“Yeah,” said Chris as they pulled into the driveway. “It means one of her cop buddies probably found out about her being on the take, and decided to go biblical on her. Thirty pieces of silver are what Pontius Pilate paid to Judas to betray Jesus, dummy.”
**
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Stevie gibbered, pacing back and forth in his own living room, a quaint little place in his Cape Cod on the south side of town. “I mean, I’ve got another dog I can use, that’ll work, right Tapper?” Tapper was in no mood to negotiate or deal with more problems before the show; his inside source in the police department was dead, his primary muscle man was dead, and now, just three days before his second event, one of the trainers’ dogs had somehow busted out of its pen and scarpered off in the middle of the night. He and Phil stood now in Stevie Johnson’s living room, listening to the man panicking even worse than he had over the phone when he’d discovered the dog was gone just an hour earlier.
“Stevie, your other dog is, for one, an old-timer, and for two, has never been in a scrap in its life,” Phil remarked. “For God’s sake, it didn’t even bark at us when we came up to the house!”
“Hey, Tucker’s got spirit, don’t let him fool you,” Stevie said, pausing in front of his couch. He half-flopped down onto it with a resounding sigh, then slouched forward, face buried in his hands. “Ah, who the hell am I kidding? I’m screwed!” Tapper made a brief hand signal to Phil, who nodded, and the ‘promoter’ headed out of the house into the back yard, heading for the separated enclosure that Stevie had set up for his fighting dogs when he kept them around. There didn’t appear to be, upon first glance, anything out of the ordinary; welded wire fencing, tightly knit, wrapped around half of the back yard and the little hut that Stevie had put together for the dog to get out of inclement weather.
When he crouched down in front of the hut and peered inside, however, Tapper immediately spotted the escape route. Someone had pried the boards loose at the back, and the mesh fencing just beyond had been clipped, likely with bolt cutters or some similar tool. Someone was scared of the competition, he thought, snarling to himself. Someone’s trying to rig the game here. Tapper took out his cell phone, took a couple of pictures, and headed back into the house, where Stevie Johnson looked up at him like he was the Grim Reaper incarnate.
“Don’t worry, Stevie,” Tapper said with a softened expression, offering the older, chubbier dog handler his phone. “This wasn’t your fault. Somebody else must’ve gotten a look at Percival and decided they didn’t like their odds.” Tapper pulled out a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and let out a long exhale, one hand on his forehead. “But Tucker’s a no-go. I’ll talk to Finnegan, he can let you rep one of his dogs for the show.” Stevie agreed to the arrangement, and on the way back to their place, Tapper got hold of Finnegan to get his acknowledgement that yes, he would let Stevie use one of his back-up animals for this event, but that even if the dog should survive its fights, he wasn’t going to let Stevie take the animal home as his own.
With only a couple of days remaining before the second event, Tapper turned to secondary information sources around town to discover what he could learn about local law enforcement’s grasp on local events. Most of what he heard from these sources was good news for his operations, as most cops around town were still befuddled and dealing with the queer scene they’d found out at the scrap yard, along with an apparent uptick in recent vandalism activity. There had also been some chatter about some strange business in one of the residential areas, reports of odd activity at a place called Straub Avenue; Straub was a cul-de-sac not far from the house Tapper and Phil were renting out, and Tapper himself could attest to the peculiar aura that hung around that narrow, self-terminating street. On one of his contemplative afternoon walks, he’d found himself suddenly ensorcelled, staring down the avenue toward its collection of empty houses at the far end. Only one house along that entire avenue was occupied, he’d learned later on, and even that lone occupant struck locals as a rather peculiar young man.
Still, all in all, it meant that he had no worries for the time being. This continued to prove the case for several more evenings, including the second event, which saw him rake in the cash and crown a new champion mutt for the circuit, the first event’s sole survivor getting torn asunder by Finnegan’s dog in the final match. There were, as he had expected there would be, cries of foul play and unfair home turf advantage, since the fights were held right in back of Finnegan’s property; the clearing was set back in the woods only about a quarter of a mile from his home, a trailer that had been set down permanently on a plot of land on the outskirts of town.
But Tapper wasn’t hearing any such complaints, and between Phil and a couple of more recent hire-on goons he’d picked up in Amelia City proper, nobody was pressing the issue. In total, he had a nice clean takeaway of about seventy-thousand dollars between the evening’s event and a few weed sales, and he got right to work making arrangements for the next fights. Most of the trainers expressed interest in another event, but they also made clear that they would need at least three full months to get a back-up animal properly primed for it. Tapper agreed to this, and started planning things out once he and Phil got back home.
The best laid plans, though, as a fellow says…
**
Having his cell phone on all the time wasn’t usually something Tapper did by choice, but rather, because he needed to be available for people to reach out to. Even when the screen provided him with no ID, he had to pick up, even when the call came in, as it was coming in now, at the pre-dawn hour of four o’clock in the morning. “Mrrg wha,” he muttered after accepting the call.
“Hey boss, it’s Tim,” said the hushed voice of one of his newer enforcers. “Um, we got a problem with one of the guys we came to collect from.” There was a cleared throat, a little awkward quiet, and then, “You should come down and see this.”
“Text me the address,” Tapper said, hanging up and dragging himself out of the bed in order to get dressed. Given some of the unknown folks who had come around to the second show, several of whom had started brawls of their own around the central match between canines, he added a snub-nosed revolver to his ensemble, taking the keys from their cup on the kitchen table and heading out the door. He didn’t need Phil for a quick check-in, not so long as he had the gun on hand.
Using Google Maps to make his way, it was a full ten minutes before he realized that he was alone on this road, a stretch that ran parallel to County Road 5, the main vessel between North Perry and Amelia City proper. But this road hooked just past the halfway point, delving into the surrounding woodland, a narrow pavement passageway that led into a sparsely populated area that seemed to have no ‘town’ to claim as its own. He passed only one driveway shortly after hooking into the woods, and it was another five minutes before he came to a second one. He spotted Tim’s pickup truck, headlights on and shining on the front porch of a quaint little cottage-style home set almost a hundred yards back from the road, and he pulled up alongside it in the driveway, which spread out into a fair-sized parking patch area in front of the house itself.
Tim stood against the truck’s driver’s side door, looking peaked, pale, as Tapper came around toward him. “What’s going on,” Tapper asked brusquely. Tim didn’t offer a verbal reply, merely turning on a high-power flashlight he was holding and guiding Tapper around the side of the house. When they reached the back of the house, he shone the beam right on their target, and Tapper had to choke back the urge to vomit. The gambler who Tim had come to observe and try to collect owed money from lay in a sprawl, torn to gory ribbons, the apparent victim of some kind of animal attack. Tim slowly moved the beam of the flashlight over toward a pair of chains, each one lashed to a dense oak tree, frayed collars of some sort dangling from their ends.
“I think the guy was going to try and enter his own dogs into the circuit, to try and use them for payment or maybe earn his way out of the hole,” Tim said, his voice coming out hoarse and raspy. “Dumb shit didn’t think to use chokers. I think they busted loose and tore him apart.”
“Well Jesus,” Tapper managed, finally losing the battle and having to step aside to avoid throwing up on Tim’s shoes. When he finished wiping his mouth, he planted his hands on his hips, looking once more down at the body, no longer exposed to the flashlight beam. “How can you even tell it’s our guy?” Tim pulled something out of his back pants pocket, handing it over to Tapper. It was a wallet, and he flipped it open, exposing the dead man’s driver’s license. Yeah, this is him, he thought, shaking his head. Something about the ID caught his eye, and he dipped his hand into the transparent plastic section, pulling out the driver’s license, exposing another picture ID that had been tucked away behind it; an Amelia State Student Identification Card.
A small pinprick of dread stabbed at the back of his mind. Were you hanging around out this way recently, Professor, he thought, thinking back on the scrawny educator who’d been removed from that first fight night in North Perry. Did you help set these dogs loose? Or is this more of what Sally was talking about when she said that trouble follows in your wake?
**
“Just help me out here, man,” Finnegan spat, scowling as he set up the ladder. Just like in the wee hours of that morning, the dog trainer had called Tapper when the sun was not out. Unlike Tim, however, he had been in a full-blown panic, gibbering about how he had to get over to his place, that the “situation is absolutely fucked here, man!” After talking the man down over the phone, Tapper had grabbed Phil, called Tim and Bobby, and the four of them had made their way to Finnegan’s place.
Saying that the situation was fucked turned out to be an understatement, he soon discovered. Using the stand-alone construction flood lights that they had used during the dog fights, Finnegan had revealed for Tapper what he had seen when he came out earlier to inspect what exactly had caused all of his dogs, in harmony, to start barking and snarling and whining and just generally losing their shit in the back yard enclosure. Dangling from lengths of choke chain from their necks from six surrounding trees were six of the other trainer/competitors who had participated in the second round of dog fights, their eyes rolled up in their heads, tongues lolling out on their cheeks, and their midsections gashed open, their entrails hanging wetly down out of their bodies for the world to see.
Now, Finnegan was using an extension ladder with Tim and Bobby’s help to cut the men down. They had initially let the first one just drop, which proved a bad idea; the corpse had practically burst apart like a water balloon, spraying blood all over everyone’s pant legs and shoes. Tapper hardly had time to observe their continued work, however; he was obsessively examining each of the bodies after they had been lowered since that first one.
A stamp of some kind had been pressed to each dead man’s left hand, a kind of temporary tattoo image of four hooked blue claws, joined along their rounded tops by a thin black horizontal line. Marking them, Tapper thought dismally. Marking them all as his prizes. Who the fuck did this? And how? Somehow, this second part seemed more important, but no answer even suggested itself to his fear-addled mind.
To keep his thoughts off of this line of inquiry, Tapper got moving, heading over to the Bobcat tractor and starting it up, turning on the headlamps that Finnegan had installed on its frame. He turned it toward the other men, holding it steady as they loaded the corpses into the upturned scoop, then maneuvering it in a slow, tight circle, guiding the loader down the path to the large, empty field west of Finnegan’s dog enclosure. He quickly dumped the bodies off, then starting using the machine to dig up a long trench, using the machine to dig out a trench of about four feet in depth before using it to carefully gather up and deposit the dead men into it. Over the course of another ten minutes, he covered them over in the recently upturned soil and grass, driving the Bobcat back to the clearing when he was finished.
Tapper clambered out, looking around for Finnegan and his men, but he saw nobody present. Must’ve headed back for the house, he mused, turning to head that way himself and coming up short. Someone was standing between two of the tall oaks in the direction he’d turned, a vague outline thanks to the spotlights not being turned toward him. “Phil?”
“Not quite, Mr. Tapper,” said a vaguely familiar voice. Taking several steps toward him, Tapper saw now revealed to him the professor from that first event, stepping up beside one of the work lights, a lascivious grin spread across his face. “I’m afraid your friend won’t be coming along to help you, either.” Tapper frowned at him, seeing that the smaller man was empty-handed, dressed in his archetypal suit with its elbow patches. The smell of spilled guts, spoiled meat, still clung to the clearing, but it had been joined by whatever cologne or aftershave the professor was wearing, a cloying, heavy scent of cinnamon.
“The fuck are you doing here, Lenny,” Tapper spat, hoping to unbalance the man by using a friendly version of his name.
“Lenny?”
“Yeah, Lenny, Leonard Corvus, lives at 1338 East Cushing Way,” Tapper said, pulling out a cigarette, feeling a swell of confidence as the grin vanished from the professor’s face. “Yeah, I know where you live, buddy boy, so don’t think you can fuck with me here. My boys can come pay you a visit any old time.” The professor’s smile slithered up across his face again, and he raised one hand, snapping his fingers. On cue, the air was rent with the rattle of chains, and Phil, Jim, Bobby and Finnegan all dropped from nearby tree branches, their feet flailing and thrashing as they tried to reach up and undo the choke chains that were cutting off their airways. The cigarette fell from Tapper’s hand, his legs trembling threateningly under him as he looked up at his men. When he looked back to the professor, no such man stood there anymore.
What stood there, instead, was a raven-headed creature in a stylized black-and-white checkerboard suit, salmon button shirt underneath and a black tie, its feet bare, exposed bird’s talons. In its hand it held a slim, silver microphone, like an old-fashioned game show host, and its wide, too-human eyes, bloodshot from the pupils on out, blinked rapidly at Tapper. The creature flashed a mouth full of savage, needle-like teeth in a wide smile, and it said in a cheerful, slightly English accent, “Quoth’s the name, actually! And you, Christopher Tapper, have been a very, very naughty boy,” it crooned, jabbing one clawed finger at him and waggling it round and round. “George Bernard Shaw, pathetic human that he was, once made a very astute observation about your kind,” it said, eyes now half-lidded, speaking with the microphone held up as if to a studio audience.
“Who,” Tapper asked, stutter-stepping backward from the creature as he pissed himself.
“Hmm, a dog-fighting scumbag who doesn’t read, what a shocker, folks,” Quoth said, giving you, dear reader, a wry grin that made him look like a cartoon character from the fifth ring of Hell. “Sort of a damning statement on the state of our public education system, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, how many of you were even familiar with that name before you read the quote at the start of this story, hmm?”
“What the fuck are you talking about,” Tapper half-shrieked, reaching behind him now for the handle to the Bobcat’s door, coming up on flat metal. He risked a quick look, and found that the door handle had disappeared, covered entirely with solid white metal.
“Hardly important, Mr. Tapper, just a brief fourth wall break, as we call it in the business,” Quoth replied, turning his attention back toward his prey. “You know, it’s a crime, what you’ve done to these poor wretches,” Quoth said, making a strange gesture with his free hand. From the darkness around the clearing came snarls and growling, soon followed by the appearance of the half-rotted, torn up, shredded dogs that had perished in the previous fight night, stalking like a pack of hunting wolves toward where Tapper stood against the useless Bobcat. “Not just a crime against them, and against the law, but against nature, Christopher. They trusted you men, you humans, and you used that trust, and turned them into your sick, savage playthings, to do gladiatorial battle for your amusement and profit! But there’s a truism that I’m rather fond of, and one that you should take a moment to appreciate.” Quoth reached into his checkerboard coat and drew out a raw steak, throwing it at Tapper’s feet, where it landed heavily, spattering fresh blood up onto his shirt. “Every dog has its day!”
And so, they did. And what a bloody day it turned out to be.
-Fin-