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  A Taste of The Department of Magic, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.

  About J.R. Rain

  About Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.

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  © 2014 J.R. Rain & Rod Kierkegaard Jr.

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  ISBN 978-1-62007-794-8 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-795-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-796-2 (hardcover)

  To my friend, Sommer. You are an inspiration. – J.R. Rain

  For Jules – Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.

  “What is the privilege of the dead? Never to die again.” - Friederich Nietzsche

  ou know you’ve had a really bad night when you wake up inside a chalk outline.

  That’s my first big clue. That and all the colored police flashers silently strobing outside through the dirty windows. It takes a few minutes for the fog inside my head to clear, but I finally figure it out: I’ve been dumped at a crime scene. I’d probably gone out drinking with some of the guys and passed out—then they’d brought me here and carefully arranged me for a gag. “Presenting”, we call this in Homicide when we see it in a murder.

  At least I hope that’s what’s happened. I don’t like to think they’d slipped me a roofie or something. Or to consider any other possible alternatives. At least my clothes are still on. Always a good sign in a situation like this, though admittedly there haven’t been that many for me, you know, where I blacked out totally. Not since college, anyway.

  In fact, I don’t usually go out drinking at all. I’ve been “working to save my marriage” lately, which means going home whenever a shift ends and not spending much of my downtime socializing with other police. And it means going to couples counseling twice a week. That had been my husband’s idea. Anyway, I’d better come up with a good excuse for tonight.

  Next, I sit up. This sucks. The big one. Then I try to stand. Both of these take some doing; my limbs feel like they’ve had lead poured into them. This place sure looks like a murder scene. It’s some kind of warehouse or big shipping garage. Cement floors, grey brick walls and two-story high bare ceiling. And a row of tall, sooty windows, some with boarded panes and bars, through which the red and blue and white police lights flash. There is a small pool of blood on the filthy concrete next to the chalked outline of a sprawling human figure—me—that’s already soaked into the floor. Blood…or maybe fruit juice, just to make the punking look realistic. A little ways off from my right hand, is a second, much smaller cartoon-like outline, that of my handgun. I realize my back is probably covered in crap from the floor, and now I’ll have to get my suit dry-cleaned. Again.

  The outline of the gun is there—but my department-issue Glock 9mm isn’t. It isn’t in my shoulder holster, either. Crap. If the bastards are really going for realism, my sidearm’s probably already back at the stationhouse on somebody’s desk. The “Chalk Fairy’s” already been at work drawing the outline; cops love to do that to victims they have a grudge against, even though it’s the ME’s job.

  So now whoever did this to me is pretending that SID—forensics—has already been in and mocked everything up, and they probably took photos of me for prominent display in the muster room or kitchen while I lay passed out. Now they’re waiting around outside for the ERV to show up and take me to the city morgue. The plan is obviously for me not to fully come to until I’m in the ambulance or even strapped in the gurney down at the morgue. So I’ll screw with them. I’ve never seen this warehouse before, but I bet there’s another way out.

  There is. A back entrance down a hallway past a dark and empty locked office. So I don’t hang around. I am so out of there. Once out on the sidewalk, I start walking toward the city center. I have no idea what time it is; I don’t wear a watch, and my cell phone is gone, probably in an evidence bag. I stop and check my pockets. Damn! No wallet. No badge; I’ve got nothing to wave at a cabbie except lint. If I can even find a cab this time of night. Even for a woman.

  That’s when I notice they’ve even taken my wedding ring. Okay, that’s taking a joke too damn far, and despite my hangover, I finally lose it. For real. Somebody is going to pay for this…

  If I’m honest, the real reason I’m so pissed is because losing the ring seems like a bad omen. For my already-shaky marriage, I mean.

  Did I say “hangover”? That’s an understatement. This is the mother of all hangovers; I feel it in my gut, in my eye sockets, even in my joints and the roots of my teeth. All over. And there’s something badly wrong with my vision, too. Everything is thermally haloed, like in a video game or one of those ghost-hunter reality shows on TV filmed with a night-vision scope. There seem to be motion trails around the street-lights and what look like the transparent shells of old buildings and advertising signs superimposed over the real ones. Which is an improvement, considering the part of town they dumped me in—it’s a hell of a long walk back to the stationhouse, and my regulation boots are already pinching my feet. My hands and feet both feel swollen. Maybe it was some kind of drug, after all. I’d been put on an SSRI when the D-word had first been mentioned at one of our counseling sessions; could antidepressants cause me to forget? Or have blackouts?

  I can’t find a pen or my notepad in my jacket pockets, either, so I can’t jot the questions down for later.

  A car passes by on the broad cross-street ahead, followed by the outlines of a second, greenish and ghostly, that looks like it’s been boosted from a museum or antique car show. It makes a faint putt-putting noise. Great. Now I’m hallucinating. And not just cars, either; more buildings that aren’t there, blinking neon signs, an old movie theater, even pedestrians, all pale green and ghostly and looking like something out of an old flick. Leaving vapor trails behind them. And walking through things.

  Yes, through things. And by things, I mean walls and doors and buildings.

  Luckily, there aren’t many real ones around tonight; real pedestrians, I mean. Just the imaginary ones. Anyway, in this part of town, there are plenty of thugs and gangbangers who would’ve been happy to settle old scores if they’d spotted me out alone and unarmed. So it must be even later than I thought if the hookers and the drug-dealers have all gone home for the night.

  By the time I finally get back to the stationhouse, I’m feeling radioactive, like I’ve been swimming in heavy water all night. I can barely stand to keep my eyes open. Hell, I can barely stand at all. All I want to do is find a couch or empty desk somewhere and rack an hour or two of sleep. Or wait until I wake up, since I was no doubt dreaming this whole damn mess. But on the off chance that I am awake―and this is the world’s worst hangover―I figure I better retrieve my personal effects and then phone home with my apologies.

  Me groveling is all that’s keeping us together at this point, pretty much.

  What I can’t figure out is exactly how I turned into the bad guy in my marriage. The bad wife. Sure, I keep lousy hours and worked crazy shifts. Sure I’m married to the job. That’s what cops call the Police Department: “The Job”. But I haven’t cheated; in fact, I’ve been totally faithful. I don’t even do drugs or drink.

  Well, unless yo
u count tonight.

  But I still don’t know exactly what went down tonight, do I? Maybe I wasn’t drunk or stoned or in the middle of a nightmare. Maybe I’m just going crazy. I prefer the first explanation, and that’s the story I’m sticking to. A few beers with some buddies, then maybe a drug interaction and a particularly tasteless practical joke.

  Then it occurs to me that maybe I should cover my lily-white ass by writing it up, like I would a case-file or an IAD report. Because whatever just happened, it isn’t going to look real good on my permanent record―my jacket, as we call it.

  Finding my wallet and police shield is a piece of cake; just as I suspected, all my personal shit is sitting inside a bag on Ayon’s, my partner’s, empty desk in the detective bureau, the one right across from mine. No Glock, though—maybe it’s in her locker. The big room is deserted. I’ve probably come in between shifts. I don’t even remember seeing a desk sergeant on duty downstairs. In fact, nobody buzzed me through the front doors; I must have followed the cleaning crew in. Not being able to remember this is not a good thing; maybe I’m having mini-blackouts again. Glancing up at the big Westclox on the wall, I see it’s five past five; everybody must still be downstairs getting coffee.

  And laughing at those crime scene photos of me, probably. I guess I should go down there now and take my licks. No, what I should really do is call home and face the music. But I notice there’s a light on in the boss’ office across the hall. Captain Ed Quirk. He’s been sleeping on the broken-down couch in there all week because his wife just threw him out of the house again. And deservedly so—he cheats. And drinks. And God knows what else. But in a police station, the captain is God.

  So after I finish typing my notes into the Dell, I get up and go knock on his door. His office walls are glass from halfway up but covered by closed blinds.

  “Come,” he yells.

  I go inside. And find him staring at me like he’s having a heart attack; purple-faced, open-mouthed, eyes bugging out of his head.

  Like he’s just seen a ghost.

  appy is not in the best of shape.

  But he’s a pretty decent guy, and nobody at the stationhouse wants a strange new boss appointed over our heads, believe me. Not while there are budget cuts going on. So naturally, my first thought is CPR. I’ve already cleared his desk and am reaching out to loosen his shirt-collar—he’s got no tie or jacket on—when I notice he’s shrinking away from me. Cowering, actually. Like he thinks I’ve got MRSA or something.

  “What the hell, Cap?”

  “Jesus Mary mother of Christ, detective! You’re dead,” he says in a stricken voice, and we just stand there staring at each other for a minute.

  “Screw you.”

  “No, seriously, Richelle. You’re dead. Definitely dead. I promise you. I just came from the crime scene. Shit, just look at yourself! You’ve got an entry wound just over your—” And he makes a trembling gesture in the direction of my left breast.

  I look down. The front of my shirt is soaked in bright red blood, a lot of it, around a hole in the front of my blue shirt. I almost faint dead away at the sight of it before I realize that I’m not still bleeding out. There’s no starburst, so I wasn’t shot too close up, but the rim of the red bloodstain is scorched brown-black, so…maybe from a few yards away. I note these details automatically, like any good police detective would, while a part of my mind follows the trajectory of the bullet hole to its logical conclusion: I’ve been shot through the heart.

  Why the fuck am I not dead? Or am I? Suddenly, I really don’t feel so good…

  “Better sit down,” he says. The purple look on his face has receded to its customary beefy red, the terror to something that looks almost like concern. The Cap is an ex-jock run to fat, with prematurely white hair. Now he gets up and approaches me cautiously as I sit down on the broke-back vinyl couch against the wall opposite his desk. It’s a soft landing—it’s still covered with his bedding.

  “I should check your pulse. Hey, you never know, maybe everybody got it wrong about you. How you feeling, anyhow?”

  “Like shit.” Nothing brings you down faster than knowing you’ve got a bullet in your heart. Now I know it’s there, I can actually feel it…a cold ache in my breast like a little heavy metal tumor. I can taste the lead.

  Meanwhile, he’s standing there sort of poking his hands out awkwardly at me and looking embarrassed. It takes me a minute or two to realize why. Quirk is not the greatest boss in the world—he plays favorites, has a nasty hooker habit, and there are rumors he usually gets his cut from impounds or drug stash seizures—but he’s never been, you know, funny with the women cops. At least not with me. He’s always looked me in the eye and kept his hands to himself. Except right now, obviously.

  “Don’t worry, Cap,” I tell him, joking weakly. “I won’t file charges.”

  So he puts a couple of his big sausage fingers on my throat over my jugular and presses, trying to find a pulse. They feel almost uncomfortably hot against my skin. My cold, cold skin.

  “Nada. And, man, your skin is like ice.” He tries my wrist next. “No heartbeat. But I can see you’re breathing.” He stares at my chest, then shakes his head slowly in bewilderment. “This makes absolutely no fuckin’ sense,” he mutters, letting my arm go. “Is there any lividity?”

  Lividity is the pooling of the blood in the body that occurs after death. It’s the result of gravity—I’d been lying on my back, so if I’d been dead for a while before I woke up, my face and the front of my body should be a deathly white and my back and butt anything from a rashy pink to a deep purple. I roll up a sleeve and have a look, but I don’t see anything. I feel around the back of my jacket; lots of grime but no exit wound, which there should have been at that range.

  “Want me to have a look?” he asks.

  He means the entry wound. “No. I’ll take a look for myself in the bathroom mirror.” The feeling from the bullet isn’t pain, exactly, more like an itch. A helluva itch. I also have an overwhelming urge to dig the bullet out. Right there in his damn office. There is a pair of tweezers in my handbag.

  “Look, Richelle, we gotta go down there so we can show them your face, and we need to do it like right now. Half the department is out looking for a cop-killer. We’ll have to do a recall, tell everybody…I dunno what. That it was all a big mistake, I guess. That the first-response team screwed up.”

  I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed to lie down. Finally, I shrugged and said, “We could say that a couple of the robbery-homicide dicks at East drank me under the table, and I passed out, so they decided to prank me by staging a shooting. Only I had a drug reaction to the drink, so everybody thought I was dead.”

  “Is that what happened, detective?” Now his look is sharp, severe. He’s suddenly a police captain again. Not a worried brother in blue.

  “Hell if I know, Cap.” This time my voice trembles slightly, and I hate myself for it. “I can’t remember a thing. Not since…what is today?”

  He has to check his computer screen. “Tuesday.”

  “I remember coming to work yesterday morning. I remember drawing a canvass up in the Heights, that domestic shooting with the rapper, right?” I strain to recall anything since then. McDonald’s lunch, eaten in an unmarked Crown Vic with Malena Ayon, my partner. Paperwork back at my desk. Phone call to Devon, my husband? Maybe. Not sure. Then nothing.

  “So you don’t know who…did this to you.” He points at my left breast again. Not a habit I want to encourage.

  I shake my head. Now I really do feel like crying. Can I? Am I even capable of it? If my heart muscles are dead, then my circulatory system isn’t working, isn’t feeding my liver and kidneys and various glands. Like my tear ducts. By now my lymphatic system, along with my renal, should be in full shutdown. But I’m breathing. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I even had a few hits from the spring water bottle on my desk when I first came in. Nothing had come spraying out of the bulle
t hole, either, like it would’ve in the movies. How am I absorbing it, the water?

  “What?” I ask, irked. He’s still staring at me.

  “You actually look pretty normal, except for the blood all over the front of your shirt. Try buttoning your jacket up—see if that covers it.” It doesn’t. Quirk sits back down again. “Look,” he goes on with a loud sigh. “Here’s how this is going down. As far as I’m concerned, you’re neither dead or alive. Just a normal overworked cop after a triple-shift, in other words. So I’m pretending none of this ever happened, because honestly, I can’t think of any other sane way to deal with it. It’s like a bad dream. But you can’t rat out any of the guys at East or any other precinct for this—otherwise we’ll get IA all up our ass, right? And you don’t want that any more than I do. Because if you’re outed, then the Feds will probably show up and try to redact your ass all the way to Guantanamo or take you apart in a secret lab or something. More to the point, with the hiring freeze, I can’t replace you. So think of some explanation that doesn’t involve the department, okay? I like the drug interaction thing. Work with that. Maybe smear some lip gloss or something over the blood, just so people think it’s a fake.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Just let me go to the bathroom first.” My itch has become a physical need. Like having stitches removed.

  “Seriously, detective, this stops with you, okay? Any more crap like this—giving it to other police, eating brains, fingers falling off you, whatever—I want you out of here, understood? Because I can’t cover for you. And put on a little makeup, will you? You do look kinda pale!” he calls after me.

  Luckily, the squad room is still empty. But it won’t be for long. I grab my purse and head to the women’s restroom, which was created by cutting the old men’s room in half with plywood and plasterboard, and lock the door behind me. Then I unbutton my shirt, pull my breast out over my bra, and for the first time, have a look at the wound in the mirror. It’s…ugly. Really horrible looking. Actually, speaking professionally and objectively, the shooter did a very clean, tidy job—thank God they didn’t double-tap me in the forehead afterwards. On any other vic, I’d be grateful it hadn’t made a big mess; this just looks so horrible because…it’s me. However, I gotta admit that whoever did it knew what he was doing. Or she. A perfectly executed lethal shot, though I can tell immediately by probing with my fingers that one of my ribs has been shattered. Shit! Now, that hurts!