Disintegration: A Windy City Dark Mystery Read online

  Disintegration is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9781101882627

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  Cover image (man’s face): Keith Ferris/E+/Getty Images

  www.readalibi.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I must be dead for there is nothing but blue snow and the furious silence of a gunshot.

  —Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

  Introduction

  There is no past. My heart was ripped from me in a rush of flashing lights and sticky yellow tape. There is no future. Vision would require hope, and that stealthy whore eludes me at every turn. So I float in the ether, pasty skin crawling with regret, eyes gouged out by my own shaking hands.

  Chapter 1

  The manila envelope slides under my apartment door like the wrinkled skin of a snake, shed in a hurry. I don’t even turn to look, though my clenched fists are shaking, my eyes pressed shut. Sitting in the living room, darkness around me like a flea-infested blanket, my forearms rest on the mahogany table, my legs trembling in the high-backed leather chair. I am full again, about to overflow, and I’ve been waiting for that envelope for hours.

  Days.

  Weeks.

  I don’t know. I’m not sure what day it is. I grit my teeth and take a deep breath. The muscles in my lower back are tightly coiled springs, ropes with knots tied that I’ll never get undone.

  I know the plastic bottles sit in the medicine cabinet. I know those tiny black bottles are sitting there. Much like Vlad slides the envelope under my door, my next assignment, much like he provides me with this luxurious squalor within which to disintegrate, he is also my pusher. He provides my escape. Or maintenance, depending on how you look at it. Two very average, very normal bottles. They could be aspirin, or acetaminophen, or naproxen. But they are not. They are two dark tunnels, bottomless pits, and I stand at the openings breathing in the musty air, rich with soil and rotting bones.

  The masking tape he rubbed on them with his filthy thumb and forefinger is slowly losing its tack. With a black Sharpie he wrote two words, and every time I look at them I see Alice dropping down the rabbit hole. And I want to join her.

  One says: Happy.

  The other: Sad.

  It’s time for a bus ride. Soon.

  I stand up slowly and open my eyes. The streetlights outside push in pale light, the blinds glowing as if the desert sun waits just beyond them. My bare feet on the hardwood floor ground me again. It’s why I keep them clean—the floors, not my feet. A faint whiff of lemon and orange, oils that reek of naked flesh and release. I need to touch things sometimes. I breathe in, brushing the wrinkles out of my jeans, running my hands down my thighs, again and again. It relaxes me. Shirtless, I run my hands over my bare, hairless chest, back and forth, to make the blood flow again.

  There are only three choices: the French doors to my bedroom; the manila envelope that rests just inside the door, an opening that leads out to the hallway of this six-flat; and the path to the kitchen. The lone window in the kitchen is cracked open and a soft, cool breeze pushes the blinds aside. A flash and bare tree branches. A glimmer and the telephone lines. A gust and wrought iron, green feline eyes, and a blur of fur. My stalker. She won’t stay, I know that much. I will myself forward to the open space of the kitchen. A sawhorse sits in the middle of the room. A two-by-four lies on top of it, secured to it by tall gray nails. I pick up the hammer, an old friend from a different life, and the weight in my hands is comforting. A dozen metal heads poke out of the mangled piece of wood, riddled with holes and dents. In quick succession I pound them flat.

  There is a skittering on the back porch as my friend runs away. My biceps flex, forearms tight as I bring the silver hammer head down, again and again. It is louder than the peace I just disturbed, but surprisingly muffled by the old apartment walls. A sheen of sweat breaks out on my forehead as I make the nails disappear. The retort echoes off the gunmetal walls, my feet growing cold on the dirty, faded tiles. The floor is the color of a sidewalk covered with grime the day after the snow melts, littered with debris, scratched and ignored. It meets the walls like an ocean floor, and I feel myself going under. I grunt in the dark room, raising the hammer over my head, slamming it down with a sharp bang, fighting the currents,
wincing in the night. And they are gone.

  I drop the hammer on the floor, out of breath, chest rising. With a turn of my neck I turn to the slice of yellow that calls to me from the other room. My enabler, my cure.

  Chapter 2

  His name isn’t really Vlad. I just call him that. Tall and gangly, hawkish nose, and a Russian accent, the buzz cut came up to me at Nik’s Package Liquors. They open early. That’s about the only nice thing I can say about Nik’s. And it’s two blocks away on Division Street, so it’s easy to get there. I shuffle down sixty-four steps, out the front door, up Milwaukee a block, and turn left. I dodge a drunk woman, staggering out of an alleyway, her hair dark and short, her face ragged and worn. In a glint of the streetlamp, she is my wife, and I flinch.

  Just past the Polish diner, meaty pierogi, for when I can actually keep food down, with applesauce and sour cream. Past the taquería with the spicy queso. They sell cigarettes too. Sometimes I can’t make it across Ashland, it’s just too much—screaming metal flying by, streams of mannequins stomping past, somewhere to be, as fast as they can, and I can barely walk.

  I try not to be a regular, at any place. But Nik’s is as bad as I get. Sometimes the fridge of beer doesn’t make it to the next day. When you drink your dinner you don’t do it half-assed. So sometimes I end up at Nik’s. Often, I’m not sure how.

  “Comrade, how are you?” he asks, the first time we meet.

  I hunched over a pint of swill in this gaping wound carved out of the store, this long piece of wood that props up many a liver—but it isn’t really a bar. It’s an extension. It’s ten feet away, a place to stumble to.

  “Fuck off,” I mumble.

  “My friend, I understand. You are busy. I am busy man too. I have proposition for you.”

  I turn my eyes up to him, bloodshot and bleary, pushing down the liquid that is my only sustenance. “I’m not like that, Vlad. Move it on down the bar.”

  “Ha…Vlad. I like that. No, sir. Not like that. Just a little legwork. A little muscle.”

  I have fourteen dollars in my pocket. I’ve been living on the street, in shelters, stealing when necessary, the last of my savings gone.

  “Real simple like. Take a package, bring a package.”

  “Drugs,” I say.

  “No. Not quite. Let’s just say an acquired taste.”

  “And why would I want to help you, Vlad? For a few lousy bucks.”

  “I just have a feeling about you. And I have an apartment, a place you can stay. I see you are committed to the drink. At least you are committed to something.”

  I hold the pint in my left hand, and reach over for the shot with my right. This liquid, this numbing.

  “You think about it, my friend. I’ll be down here at the end of this lovely bar. But the offer won’t last for long. Just until I finish my vodka and am out that door.”

  Chapter 3

  I kept the answering machine. It sits on the shelf in the stony wasteland that is my kitchen. And I press the button. Way too often. I press the button when I am drunk out of my head. When I’m bouncing off the walls, tearing at my skin. I press it and become a marble statue, completely still, eternally cold, and empty inside. I stand next to the sawhorse, with its mangled bits of wood and metal shards sticking out of it and I press it again.

  “Hey, baby, I guess you’re working late again….”

  I should be dehydrated by now, but I’m not. It’s been three years. I ache as if I’ve been punched in the gut, my head swimming. It’s like she’s right there. Just up the street. Be home in a minute. And I see the house in the suburbs, the green grass, the red mailbox flag sticking straight up, the blue siding a calming presence.

  I head to the bathroom. Happy is calling.

  Chapter 4

  I don’t know what it is. It could be speed, crystal meth, ecstasy, LSD, Special K, or all of the above. I assume the latter. I can’t talk about Sad right now. I’m too fluid.

  Completely naked now, I lie on the hardwood floor, fully erect, as if I could slide it between the slats. One gaunt cheek is pressed against the wood, my eyes counting the individual fibers in the yellow manila envelope. It isn’t really yellow. More like a rust. A burnt sienna, peach, tangerine, a bit of sandalwood, tan, beige—it keeps changing in the light. I run my tongue over the edge of it, the corner, slowly, very slowly as it creases my skin. I can feel the tiny capillaries, each one a skyscraper in my mouth. I close my mouth and swallow, the copper gliding down, the paper-thin cut a Grand Canyon, gaping wide for the world to see. I smack my lips, and run my tongue over them. They are parchment, flaky and dry, now moist and plump. I wish that Holly was here to kiss me, to slide her perfect pink bits of flesh into my mouth.

  Holly is not my wife. She is my guardian angel, or so I’d like to think. She often appears in the middle of the night. I worry that perhaps she simply sneaks away from her other life, her time in the daylight, to be with me. I have so little to cling to that I don’t question it, I’m just grateful when she appears—her key in the door, her warm body slipping under the sheets, the most real thing I know.

  When she reclines in my bed with me, running her fingers over the tattoos on my arms, my chest, my wrists, my back, she says that she can save me. I have no phone, no television set, no computer, and no mail comes to me. I have one key—one. I close my eyes and summon her. I want to see her perfect face, the sharp pale angles, the short black bob, the frosty skin with the creamy filling. She could show up at any time, any minute. I drift off into a black hole, I become one with the gaps in the ancient hardwood, my cells merging into the swirls and grooves, and as I go, I kill again. I see the bodies stacked like a cord of wood—broken bones, bullet holes, dented skulls, and bruised necks. Knife wounds and bloody thumbprints and a baseball bat with long black strands of hair glued to the end by a sticky red syrup. I whimper and go over.

  Chapter 5

  I’m warm and dry and her moist breath is on my neck. I don’t feel the world around us, we are floating on a cloud, her body pressed up against my back, her every curve etched into my memory. Her heat is soft against my shoulders, my arms, and I can feel the soft fur of her decadence pressed up against the curve of my ass. Her hand reaches around me, her tiny hand and long fingers grabbing hold of my turgid erection. Her touch makes me cry and as the tears run down my face, as she rubs up and down, her tongue in my ear, she whispers to me, she says all the things I need to hear, her musk and sweet perfume intoxicating. I feel her other hand busy between her legs and she is a machine, pistons pumping, her hot gasps filling my ears, and the sky parts, erupting in sunshine and white light, an explosion of speckled white scattered against black felt, her body pressed against mine, trembling in unison, and I am filled with her. I am overloaded. My circuits shut down and I go blank.

  Chapter 6

  A cat yowls outside, waking me up. My friend, Luscious. She gets jealous, and yet still plays hard to get. I roll over to stare at my naughty elf, but she is not there. On the nightstand sits a solitary tube of lipstick. She has left me a memento, a purplish red tint called Bruise. I stare at it in wonder, but I’m light today. I’m a feather. I float for a moment, the darkness pushed to the edges, the clouds only fringed in gray.

  But I know what the day holds.

  Death.

  Chapter 7

  Like any employee, I have a uniform. For this position, as Everyman, this version, I must be a bohemian hipster, cool without trying, invisible in any neighborhood haunt—coffeehouse, bar, restaurant, Salvation Army, Burger King, or currency exchange. I must be immediately forgettable riding the Blue Line el into the city, into the tunnel, screaming by water-laden alleys and rotting back porches. I must not stand out when hanging at the corner of Damen, North, and Milwaukee holding a Starbucks Venti Mocha or in a dive bar with a bottle of Miller Lite, while eating a hot dog, gyro, or plate of sushi.

  My apartment is not as small as it looks. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom. No closets. I kept a few thi
ngs from my previous life. I kept the hand-hewn dining room table. I run my hands over it when I pass it, every bump and scratch, every touch a moment in time. It’s cruel and I don’t care. I wallow in it. I kept the armoire from our bedroom, intricate moldings and shabby chic embellishments, more dark brown wood, to match my hair, a wavy thick brown mane, and my cup-of-coffee eyes, a cup left out on the counter overnight—cold, bitter, and dull in the middle. And I kept the dresser. Mexican artisans, no doubt shirtless while they drank tequila, sucking on limes and salt, bushy mustaches, scrawling GRINGO in every drawer, way in the back, only visible if you pull them out and flip them over.

  The uniform I wear when I leave my burrow is a variation on a theme. Black in every sense of the word. Not onyx, obsidian, midnight, or coal. But T-shirt, mock turtleneck, polo, or tank. Black combat boots. Black leather jacket. The only deviation the workingman’s staple, the blue jeans—Levi’s, the Gap, DKNY, Old Navy. They fill every drawer with their pitch, every hanger with their vacuous glare.