Hey readership,
I been wanting for a long time to explore noir thematics. This is it guys, a new episodic called Black Sun, which is the last piece of episodic fiction completing the backbone of Dead End Follies. Enjoy and comment!
Every night, when I slept, I saw his face. Every day, when I looked into the mirror, I saw him again. Every time I touched my throat, I remembered him. I never knew his name, but I remember well enough. Eight years after, the details are as clear, even maybe cleared than when it happened. His tobacco smelling breath, the pearls of sweat on his arm and his knife against my throat. My demise had been his success. Slashing jugular vein has been a big enough distraction so he could run away with the few thousand dollars he robbed from the MacDonald’s safe on that night. Eight years ago, I almost traded my life for a Big Mac.
If Doctor Mary Ann Sherwood wouldn’t have had a crave for a McChicken on that night, I would’ve died for that goddamn Big Mac. She put pressure on the gaping wound to keep me from bleeding out with a pile of napkins as she told her husband Dan to go get her first aid kit in the car. Even with that guardian angel on site, I lost around thirty percent of my blood on the floor. I still remember sometimes the fries on the floor, bathing in a pool of my own blood. It’s so intense that sometimes I feel it’s the only thing real that ever happened to me.
That day, October 25th 1984, was the beginning of hard times for the Parker family. Being fifteen years old and all, I couldn’t help but to drag the Parkers into this. Fortunately, my mother didn’t live up to see this. She died in a car crash six weeks before it happened. My dad being dead since I was two, it’s my two older brothers, John and Pat that took care of me. In order to pay my bills, they started doing jobs for Tony Cullen, the local mafia kingpin. Turning to a life of crime might seem like an ill advised choice when your baby brother just got his throat sliced by a petty thief, but they were respectively eighteen and twenty, they couldn’t figure out something better in order to pay my fifteen grand hospital bill. They were not too hyper about it, but the idea of getting me and my baby sister Mona through college drove them into being renowned local mobsters.
Their dream came true. Soon enough, my only ambition was to repay my brothers for what they did for me. Our mother Linda always prone to us the righteousness of the virtue and the advantages of being on the good side of the law. I knew that when they started to work for Tony, they were doing something that was going against their nature, against their instinct. They grew more distant to me, acting more like fathers than brothers. Sometimes they were disappearing for a few days, but I didn’t ask any questions, I just did my best to take care of Mona and to get good grades at my exams.
One of the many things that changed for me after being a victim was that fascination I got with the law. I guess it didn’t help that my brothers decided to step over it to help me, but I had only one thing in mind now, become a cop. I wanted to become the best, most ruthless and honest cop the city of Seattle would ever know. So I just went at it, completely. I started to train at sixteen in order to pass the physical tests of police school and to get the best grades I could. I entered police academy at eighteen years old, proud and smiling. I still have the two pictures on my office wall. One with John and Pat, the other with John and Mona, because there was no one else to hold the camera for us. When John and Pat started working for Tony Cullen, pretty much the whole family turned their backs on us. So when we took these pictures in our living room five years ago, there was no one to hold the camera.
Police Academy was great. During these three years, I felt I found my place on earth. Classes were easy, subjects were incredible and doing research or training were not a task, but something I did out of pure enjoyment. I was first of my promotion for the whole three years. I lived and breathed police work. My teachers were calling me “Chipper”, saying I was the blue chip prospect of the promotion. That period of bliss lasted three years, or almost.
One of the final exams before graduation was an extended psychological test. Not your every day “how do you feel” test. No, it’s too easy to cheat. No one knew about this test, during three days we were going to get pushed by teachers, acting cops and school officials. The goal of this was to see how we could react under extreme pressure. The behavior sought was a calm and collected one, barely different from the everyday life. We were a hundred and twelve in the promotion, but there were only sixty chairs rented for graduation. Failure rate was enormous.
I cracked during a drill at fucking MacDonald’s. A hostage situation. I felt sucked back in time. My pulse went out of control, images started running in my head. I didn’t even do that bad. I just shot the bad guy in the face with the paint guns we were given. I shot him his two accomplice and an hostage (in the shoulder). Two days after, I was called in the principal’s office to be told I flunk the psychological exam and was not going to graduate. They were looking for a peaceful solution to the situation. I was told that I had showed poor negotiation skills and an itchy trigger finger. The robbery was for what they referred as a pitiable amount of money and I should have had convinced them that it was not worth it to throw their lives away for this. Sometimes I think they did it on purpose.
It’s John that gave me the idea of applying for Private Investigator license. “They give PI licensed like hot cakes, you’d be your own boss and you’d be as psycho as you want. There is no psychological test for that.” I listened to my brother and a few weeks after my twenty first birthday, on August 16th , I opened my office : “Mike Parker, investigation consultant”. I didn’t like the term Private Investigator, sounded too Hollywoodian for me. John and Pat helped me to find a good spot to do business in downtown Seattle and Mona decorated the place, it looked very good.
The work of a PI wasn’t that interesting though. The conspiracies, the bad guys, the back alley brawls, it was all fiction. All I had to make a living were estranged wives, seeking to get proof against their cheating husbands. Most of the time, my brother absorbed the cost of rent for my office. I had this investigation once where I had to find a disappearing kid, but I found the poor toddler dead behind the shopping mall a few days after.
Life has a funny way to turn things around though. The Parkers are specially gifted to place themselves in destiny’s aim. I was eating dinner with Mona in my office on October 24th. Chicken we ordered from that barbecue joint across the street. They had the best chicken filet in town. Along with the barbecue sauce, it was like a party in your mouth and everyone is invited. Mona was into one of her crazy stories as usual:
“So, I told that bitch to shove it up her ass you know? Who the hell does she thinks she is, telling me I needed colors.”
Mona had light emotional issues, with anger, particularly.
“Do you treat every salesmen like this?”
“Come on, I know tanning beds are expensive, but it’s not necessary to insult your potential clients into buying.”
My baby sister was one of the things I was getting up in the morning for. I just loved to hang out with her. She was so fired up about everything. Mona was living to intensely that she often made me feel bad for not wanting to try everything life had to offer within two weeks. She was that fun. My job was boring and repetitive, but I got my fair share of entertainment by hanging out with her on week-ends. My sister was the type of girl to dance on the bar at the club, only to smash a bottle of liquor on your head if you touched her somewhere inappropriate. She was backed up by two mobster brothers and another one who had a gun permit and who boxed three times a week. She had no reason not to feel confident. She was also a nurse during the day, but that was beside the point, it was a job for her, nothing else.
I heard a knock on the door. First of all, my brain kind of dismissed it. I told Mona: “So, did she have tanning samples or something?”
“There’s someone at the door dude.” Mona told me, taking a bit of her chicken filet.
“Oh, yeah, the door. Move you feet from my office please, I’d like to look professional.”
“Whatever, Magnum PI”, she said, putting her feet down.”
“And put your shoes back on, your feet smell weird.” I said, vaporizing some perfume in the room.
“Hey fuck you!” my sister answered me.
I opened the door to fall face to face with Karen Tinsley, my ex girlfriend. I had dated Karen for a little more than a year at Police Academy. I was the top dog over there, so the Academy marked my only lucky streak with women. The problem was, I wasn’t very used to it. After the passion settled down with Karen, I started fooling around with other girls. I was stupid because she was a good girl. Hot girl and good girl rarely pair up, but in Karen’s case, it was. She was what I refer to as an A Plan. She was from Olympia and every guy over there saw themselves having children and a family with Karen. I could’ve, but I pissed it away for fake tits and instant satisfaction. She was a regret, but she was the kind of regret I tried to think about as little as possible. When she knocked on my door that day, I hadn’t seen her in three years.
She just stood there in my doorway, with her eyes full of tears, trying to smile to me. She seemed even more petite than in my memories. Her hair was shorter and died paler than the thick black it used to be, it was somewhat brown. It’s Mona that reacted the first. She loved Karen, when I broke up with her, Mona took three months before talking to me again. When Mona loved someone, she didn’t half-ass anything. When she recognized Karen, she pushed me to the side so hard that I tripped over my garbage in and fell. On my back, the only thing I could see was Mona hugging Karen saying : “Karen baby, I’m so happy to see you again, don’t cry.”
I got up, feeling stupid and I pulled up a chair: “Here Karen, sit down.”
Mona pulled up my chair next to her so I sat on my desk.
“Karen, what’s up? Why are you crying like this?” asked Mona.
Karen just let it loose and cried in my sister’s arm for a good five minutes before being able to talk again.
“I’m sorry guys, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry or sound dramatic, I guess I failed pretty bad huh?” she said with a sad smile.
“No problem bab..hem…Karen, tell me what’s going on?”
“I need to hire you for a job Mike.”
“Yeah I figured out that part, but who’s putting you in such a state.”
“Oh Mike, so much went wrong after we broke up.”
Mona gave me the glare of death. Whatever was happening, I knew now that it was my fault.
“Tell me what happened” I told her, handing her a box of Kleenex.
“You know I failed the psychological exam too right?”
That I also knew. Karen was one of the fifty two students which that test had failed.
“A lot of people failed too Karen, hell I failed and I was first of the promotion, there is nothing to be ashamed about.” I said.
“Well it’s not that, I started dating Trevor Greenwell shortly after. Trevor has succeeded the exam and I felt you know I could live my dream through him, as a policeman also he maybe could put a word in for me so I could take that fucking test again.”
I knew she was dating Trevor Greenwell, but I didn’t know she had such selfish motives for doing so.
Neither Mona or me were talking, so she took the cue and continued.
“Trevor turned out to be a very successful cop. He made it through the police ranks very fast.”
I nodded, attentive.
“Few months ago, Trevor started being more distant. I first thought he was seeing another woman, I investigated on it myself, but, every night after work, he went at a bar with his friends Tom and Phil, disappearing at the second floor.”
“Did you find out what they were doing in there?” asked Mona.
“No, after three days of that I got bored and told myself he was probably playing cards and drinking. He often smelled like alcohol when going back home. I didn’t
make a big deal out of it, he was still as nice as he ever was.”
“Until…” I said, smelling her disarray was fresh.
“Until last Friday”.
“What happened on Friday” asked Mona.
“He didn’t come back home before late at night. I woke up from the noise he was doing in the garage…”
I was seeing where she was going with it. Trevor put himself in trouble, she probably didn’t want to throw his career away, she seemed to love him, but she couldn’t sleep at night. My guess was that she probably wanted us to identify the person.
She started to cry again.
“When I arrived to the garage…he was putting a human head in a garbage bag.”
I nodded silently, out of respect for her fear and confusion, waiting for her to tell me what she wanted to do about it. Mona was caressing her back.
“It was Glen Winchester’s head” Karen said before starting to cry loudly again in Mona’s shoulder.
Slowly, blood drained itself away from my face. I could explain why she was scared, confused, disgusted, whatever. She surprised her boyfriend disposing of the Seattle chief of police’s body. I was surprised that she even lived to tell about it. Cop or not, Trevor Greenwell was in deep trouble. You don’t kill a chief of police and get away with it. Glen Winchester disappeared four days ago…the doubts were on Tony Cullen….I would have had to talk it over with John and Pat.
“Are you…sure?” I gathered the strength to say.
“Mike, I’ve been invited to dinner at his house so many times, Glen liked Trevor, he told him all the time he was leadership material.”
I couldn’t say anything coherent. Mona was too stricken with the horror of what she just heard.
“Please Mike, I need to know what he’s doing. Money’s not a problem, I need to know why he did this and what he’s up to. I’m scared for him, for us…Mike will you help me?”
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