Bitter, Part 2

Bitter (Part 2 of 2)
an4@anon.lelnet.com

   "So you're telling me that based on a matchbook you saw on the dead woman's
coffee table, you know who the murderer is ?" Lisa Anne asked, rolling her
eyes in that way she did so often, as though she was tolerating the prattle of
an ill-behaved child.
   "You know that's only half it, L'anne. I saw her in the dead woman's eyes."
Molly sighed. L'anne believed, but in an half-hearted way. Her partner was
only twenty-nine, but she carried herself like a woman of forty. Time was a
cruel mistress, after all, and it was the only one L'anne had. "Is that the
best you could do ?"
   She was wearing a plain black mock turtleneck, black jeans, and an all too
stylish leather jacket like the ones soccer moms wore. Her straight red hair
was knotted up in some weird configuration which was still too yuppie. She'd
clipped earring on various parts of both lobes, but it just wasn't goth. Even
the powdery makeup on her face was too light.
   "We can't all have nose rings and tight waist-length letter jackets."
   Molly had hooked a thin silver chain from her ear to her nose ring and had,
at least, gotten the makeup right.
   "How can you see with the sunglasses on ?"
   She was wearing small-lensed round black prescription sunglasses to hide the
fact that her eyes were young and bright rather than tired and bloodshot. She
pulled her pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lit one casually.
   "You started smoking again ?" L'anne said, mingling disapproval and shock in
her voice. "Or is it just part of the disguise."
   L'anne had been a smoker once. In fact, Molly had found her a kindred spirit
early on, when she'd been new to quitting. They were the only two detectives
who didn't smoke, and the only two women, and the youngest pair as well.
L'anne had provided support a number of times when Molly wanted to light up.
   So rather than telling her the truth, she returned the favour.
   "it's part of the disguise, L'anne."
   "Come on-"
   "No, I'm dead serious."
"I can't," L'anne said, but there was a kink in her armour and Molly saw it.
All her brave talk about never wanting a cigarette a day since she quit- well,
Molly had known it was a lie of sorts, but now, looking at it through a
smoker's eyes, well, she could see it was an act. In fact-
   "Come on, L'anne. You've been sneaking cigarettes for two months now, haven't
you ?"
   It was in the woman's eyes.
   "I- fuck, you're embarrassing me."
   She handed the pack and the lighter to her.
   "Just a couple."
   "You're evil."
   Molly smiled. It was true, after all. But not tonight. God, not tonight. Or
at least not the rest of it.
   "What are we looking at ?"
   Molly led her down an alley because club traffic was walking by them. The
alley was dark, and it had a rancid smell. That was good, better to get in the
mood by.
   "I think- Well, let's make this quick. I think our killer talked our victim
into going home on the assumption that she was- a vampire."
L'anne, was staring at the cigarettes as if they were a nuclear cooling rod,
almost dropped the lighter as Molly blew smoke in her face.
   "Come on. Vampires ? You've been watching too much Sunday night television."
   "Don't Scully me, L'anne. Just listen. I think our killer is a psychopath who
thinks  she's a vampire. She got this woman into that apartment, the woman
realised that she couldn't deliver what she was promising, so our killer
snapped and beat her to death- very carefully. I think-"
   L'anne slapped herself in the forehead hard enough to leave a livid handprint
in her powdery makeup.
   "Last year we had a killing like this. Same cause of death. But the marks
were different. There were some significant variations to the slashes under
the neck-"
   "If you positioned the body correctly- was it a russian woman ?"
   "No, a man. That's part of why I didn't make the connection. That and I'm an
idiot. Position the body how ?"
   "So that the cuts look like a cross."
   "You're thinking russian orthodox ?"
   "Yes."
   "Why ?"
   "A symbol of something hated, carved onto the body of a person who becomes
nothing more than a symbol of impotence to our killer."
   "That's pretty bent."
   "Are you going to light one of those or not ?" Molly asked.
   "Do I really have to ?" L'anne asked, but Molly could see very clearly that
she wanted to. 
   "Yes,"
   Without further protest, she did just that, lighting a cigarette and smiling
as she did. The inhale was impressive for a woman who supposedly had not
smoked in some time.
   "It feels good, doesn't it ?" Molly asked.
   "God, yes. Let's get this over with."
   Molly was more than happy to obliged.

   Both of them were carded at the door. It was strange. Just before lighting
the cigarette, L'anne's look had again reminded Molly of how old her partner
seemed, but that cigarette did wonders for her, making her look even less than
her age, rather than more. It was a pleasant change. She intentionally
neglected to ask that her cigarettes be returned to her.
   They walked inside and the music struck Molly first. Some heavy industrial
metal version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, concentrating on the
dire opening movement. It was fitting, of course, if lacking the full range of
Bach's original emotional intent. Bach had moved the piece away from the
direction that the horror movies liked to take it in, thinking more perhaps of
angels rising out of a storm than the way the piece was interpreted now days,
before returning to explore a darker sound.
   She much preferred this version, which showed no light at the end of the
metaphysical tunnel. A soul could easily find itself trapped in this version,
lost in the downward aspects of tonal inconsequentialness.
   There was pain here.
   They walked through the place, ignoring the come-ons and the yuppie chiche
goth morons who didn't understand the truth behind these places any more than
they understood that being able to pay for drinks with American Express did
not make them better, either as people or as posers. If this what their victim
had been like, well, it was a bit harder to evoke any sympathy for her present
condition.
   "I love Bach," Molly said, having all but forgotten L'anne. 
   "What ?"
   Molly turned and looked at her partner, who was less nervous and ill at ease
with gentle wisps of smoke trailing from her nose. Still, fear clung to her
like a stench. She didn't, couldn't, understand this place. Not the idiots
populating it, but the place itself. In Bach's world their had been soaring
angels, but there had been devils as well, which was why in the end Toccata
and Fugue dropped down into the netherworld again.
   Strip away the virtuoso runs of the keyboard and the piece started dark and
ended darker. Milton, with the paradise lost and not regained.
   Then she saw her. Near the back. Near the rooms used for bloodsports.
Waiting, as though she knew they would come, as though perhaps she had left
the matchbook, hoping for an adversary.
   Molly locked eyes with her, drew on her cigarette. The woman responded by
lighting a VS 120, its length sexual in her pale but ageless hand. Her gray
eyes sparkled. She lit the cigarette with the grace of a young Betty Davis and
Molly found her vision fading to black and white. She saw the woman, and she
saw her victim through eyes as cold as stones in cold running water. The woman
smiled, smoke passing over her perfect white teeth like an avalanche on a
deserted mountainside.
   "Maybe I should do this alone," Molly said, her voice level and fearless. 
   "That's her,' L'anne asked, trying but failing not to stare.
   "Yes, that's her. Stop staring."
   "Sorry. But we do this together. After what she did to that poor woman-"
   Before they could reach her she turned and walked towards one of the rooms,
pausing only to beckon Molly once with the hand holding the cigarette. Then
she was gone, leaving behind only the faint echoes of smoke amidst the crush
of sound and the press of bodies.
   "Maybe we should call for backup, Molly."
   "This only works if we do it. Get the uniforms involved and she slip away.
Trust me."
   "You're sure about this ?"
   Molly had never been so sure in her life. But of what ?
   They made their way to the door and Molly slipped her hand around it. As she
did a thin and slender but strong hand closed around her wrist.
   "Two drink minimum for that-" the waitress said, fear and boredom co-mingling
in her brown eyes.
   Molly considered flashing her badge, but decided against it. Instead, she
used her free hand to slip her wallet from her back pocket and pulled out a
twenty.
   "That's not enough," the waitress said petulantly. "It's thirty even."
   Molly handed her another twenty. "Just keep the change."
   "Let me know when you decide what you want."
   Molly watched the girl, twenty-one only in a lie, walk away. Then she reached
out for the doorknob. It was cold to the touch, cold and unwelcoming. She
turned it and swung the door open.	
The room had an old, musty smell undercut by the stale scent of blood. The
place reeked of dishonourable intentions, of things that would have been a
crime in the waking world but were part of this place's status quo.
She was standing just inside the doorway, smoking, the cigarette, so long it
had to be a new one, burning between her fingers and her lips as she drank
smoke from it. It was lifted away, and she leaned forward even as Molly
reached for her gun. The world slowed to a frame by frame existence. Her hand
wrapped around the stock of her automatic as the door swung closed behind
them. The woman's lips brushed a strangely calm L'anne's ears, smoke and words
washing over her.
   Set up like a parlour, there was a couch to the right of the door and L'anne
sank into heavily as Molly finally, agonisingly, produced her gun.
   The woman smiled at her, feral and arrogant.
   "Even if there were bullets in that gun, I wouldn't be afraid of it, you
know."
   "What did you do to her ?" Molly asked, her voice sparkling clear and utterly
calm.
   "I merely reminded her that she was tired, that it was past her bedtime.
She'll wake up in a few minutes, I suppose. But I wanted us to have some time
alone."
   "Why ?"
   "Because you know what I am. What I have to offer." She paused to smoke, and
Molly decided to join her. 
   She actually sounded like she might just confess.
   The gun was put away- the woman was right that it was useless. She reached
into her right pocket and felt something the size of a cigarette pack, but
not. 
   Turning back to her partner, she retrieved her cigarettes and lit one.
   "You're not like the others. You understand-"
   Molly had been fighting the understanding because she really did believe the
rational explanation. She drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled, and smiled.
   "Was that Geena Jackson's mistake ? Not understanding ?"
   "Really, Detective. Must we play this game ? I deny, you threaten to produce
witnesses who saw us together. You seek a warrant, but with no physical
evidence, you fail to get one. I make myself less obtrusive for a space of
time and eventually you move on to cases you can solve. What a boring
existence you ask me to believe you would like to lead."
   She drew hard on the cigarette, smoke curling up and away as she filled her
lungs with it. Molly followed suit, thought about what the right answer was.
   Don't play to their psychosis.
   "When she realised that you couldn't offer what you promised, she became
abusive, angry. A symbol of your impotence, just like what rages inside you
because you can never be what you would like. So you killed her. Killed her
and left a faint mark of a thing that you hate. Maybe you were abused by a
clergy as a child, maybe your parents were too religious-"
   "My, what a rational explanation. How comforting to put such an human face on
evil- your evil."
   "You couldn't deliver, so you butchered her."
   "Broke her, actually," the woman said with a smirk. "But you have it all
backwards. I could have given her what she said she wanted. Far easier than
giving her what I did. She was beautiful- she had potential. But she grew
fearful when she realised that it wasn't just a game, that it wasn't just a
come on for sex. That it was real, that I was real. She didn't, it turned out,
want anything real, and that was her downfall."
   Molly's faith- in what she knew to be true, wavered slightly. Perhaps it was
something she heard in the woman's voice and perhaps it was just paranoia, but
she felt herself slipping sideways into the pit.
"I'll make the same offer to you I made to her, Molly."
"Why would you do that ?"
"Because there's a part of you," she said, pausing to draw again on the
cigarette, "that wants to know what I know. You understand that pain is not
something that's felt but something that's done. You see it in other people's
eyes and you comprehend that pain is administered with great care. That it is,
at the end of the day, a sort of love."
"I don't want that," Molly said, but there were words and there was meaning
and they weren't the same.
"I'm offering you the one thing you can never know, not like that, not as you
are now-"
"You killed her with no more concern that you would have paid an insect-"
"To kill someone, they must be alive. Like I am." She paused, drew on the
cigarette, exhaled, as though nothing here was so dire as to interrupt her
smoking. "Like you want to be. What you had with your sister tonight-
interesting, but one dimensional. I'm offering you an orgasm for the soul,
night after night, year after year, until the end of time-"
"What about her ?" Molly asked, indicating her partner. And playing along with
the delusion, which was bad. But she was not so much of a detective right now.
"If she means something to you, then she lives. We can leave her right here,
walk out into the night, and simply not come back."
"If I say no ?"
Again, the woman's smile was bitter, like ice cracking with the first thaw.
"If you say no, it's because you don't believe."
"I'm a skeptic- it's my job to be skeptical. Show me what I need to know."
Now Molly was provoking her. Intentionally provoking her because her bizarre
confession would probably never hold up in court. Best to get her angry,
confrontational, so that she would do something foolish. 
   "My name is Arial," the woman said, her voice like silk now. She spoke and
wisps of smoke danced from her mouth. "I won't do that to you, you know. Won't
get angry with you the way I did her."
   "Why am I different ?" Molly asked. She drew nervously on her cigarette.
   "Because you are. Why does the moon rise ? It's doesn't matter why."
   "I don't believe you. Don't believe you're anything but a woman with some
serious emotional problems."
   Arial nodded her head deferentially. "As you said, you remain a skeptic.
That's admirable, when you do it in the face of your emotions."
   "I'm not afraid of you."
   The smile Arial treated her to this time was warm and full of teeth. So many
teeth.
   "You should be," she said, and then she did the most amasing thing.	
   She barred her lips, like an animal prepared to strike. Her eyes seemed to
change somehow, taking on the most unnatural amber color. Her entire face
seemed bent on some sort of transformation, but what it changed to was not
ugly. Rather it was beautiful, in an hellish sort of way. It was hard, of
course, not to concentrate on the teeth.
   The teeth.
   The fucking teeth, which were either real or a very elaborate hoax.
   No, they were real. She hadn't seen this in the victim's eyes because Arial
had not transformed for her, would never had transformed for her.
   The pain was, after all, a sort of love.
   Somehow, despite the teeth, she managed to close her lips around the
cigarette. It was amasing to watch because she was truly more beautiful now, a
fair demon of pleasing countenance. Smoke poured from her nose and Molly
understood that it was show, in a way. `See, we are not so very different.'
   Molly reinforced the point by drawing on her own cigarette. Filled her lungs
with the smoke.
   There was no pain in it. Of course there wasn't. She wanted, still wanted,
the pain. So desperately. And she knew what she had to do to get it.
   "I can see in your eyes. You understand me now, what I can offer you."
   Molly exhaled and sighed. She was beginning to feel turned on by Arial, who
enhanced the sensation by taking another sharp pull on her cigarette. Molly
allowed her hand to drift downward, over the tight jeans, and began rhythmic
stroking. It felt so good, which was not what she really wanted right now.
   Which made all of this possible.
   Arial moved closer. She had been drifting around the room throughout their
conversation, but she just realised it now.
   That worried Arial. She did not control this situation any longer, maybe
never really had.
   She was able to subsume that, however, because Arial would see in her mind
what it was she really wanted. Molly took one last long patient draw on the
cigarette and then lifted her head to expose the pale skin of her neck. Arial
seemed to glide forward, her beauty now like a fire burning away the
resistance in Molly's soul. It would be so easy and so right to do this.
   Arial bent her own head, arcing it slowly downward, making the moment last.
Molly waited until she felt the ivory tickle of four fangs on her throat and
then stuck the taser into Arial's stomach. There was an audible jolt and Arial
fell backwards, sinking to her knees.
   "You bitch," she said weakly.
   Arial zapped her again.

   L'anne was standing outside the club, lighting a cigarette she'd bummed from
god knew who and watching the patrol car drive away.
   "What happened to me ?"
   "You fainted," Molly said, lying. Maybe in the morning she would be able to
explain it in a way which made sense.
   "We're not going in tonight to process the arrest ?"
   "No. The blueshirts can handle the walk-through. And you need some rest."
   With that, Molly simply started to walk away, leaving L'anne to watch her
fade into the black of the night. It was a fifteen block walk, but Molly
didn't mind. No, she needed this. As she got close, she felt on her keyring,
and yes, it was still there, the dead woman's key. When she reached the front
steps, she paused to light a cigarette and then walked up to the door and let
herself in.
   The place was just as she remembered it, although the smell had faded
considerably.
   But now, she could smell Arial here as well, like a toxin left on the walls
and in the blood-stained rug. A wonderfully enticing taint.
   She walked to the middle of the room, slowly, heavily. God, she was so very
tired now. It was well after midnight and she'd hardly slept the night before.
   She sank to her knees and lifted her head to the sky. Those teeth had been on
her throat. She had been that close to it.
   All she would have had to do was accept it. She wanted it so badly.
   "All I ever wanted-" she said, and then she drew deeply on her cigarette and
began to cry.
   The pain felt so very good.

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