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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on Jun 25, 2014 2:22:43 GMT -5
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Post by Kaez on Jul 2, 2014 22:21:09 GMT -5
"Where's Red?"
Shadows crossed the great concrete ribcage of the parking garage, slicing the matte grey with a strange black geometry. No response over the line. The eerie song of florescent lights echoing through the maze of cars and stone. Between two parallel lines of black Lincolns and Mercedes was a red "EXIT" sign hung over two wide doors. Beyond, the stairs that Red took every Monday at 6:11pm.
They'd been watching. Prowling behind the great concrete trees, lurking at bus-stops and passing through park trails. They'd spent years, tracking in all the wrong places. Trampling all the wrong prey. Their stomachs were growling. But Washington is full of dark corners and there are more hidden alleys than any eyes, no matter how keen, can patrol.
And Red was clever. He kept his cloak tight, his steps silent, his voice muted. Covered his trails, hid out under the roots and in the strangest caves. Always took his cloak off before heading into town. He was smart. Oh, he was smart alright.
But smarts only get you so far in the Capitol. Smarts don't keep you safe between the streetlights and around the old brick corners. Smarts don't keep the wolves at bay. Money. The only goddamn thing anyone ever cares about, even if they pretend, even if they swear by it. Wife? Kids? Country? Honor? Name your price. Everyone's got one.
Name your price.
The doors swung. There he was. Cheap suit. Cheap haircut. Five o'clock shadow. Keep a low profile. Keep in the shadows. Cover your prints.
"Red's in the Woods. All eyes on the Path."
Red walked through the diagonal shadows, fading in and out of view. He'd gone a decade walking this same path and no one was the wiser.
But someone named their price. Seven million, so it happened. Set up the Russian with a new house and name. Give him some money, settle him down, watch him for the rest of his life, and he'd hand over the case. A brown-leather, Moscow-printed suitcase full of nothing but paper and files: seven million. The wolves' stomachs were growling. They were starved. Anything. Any price. Any cost. Just give us Red. Anything for Red.
Engine roll, reverse lights, Audi flickers through the canopy's light and out onto the Path. A wolf every inch of the path. There was no escape.
Did he know? Did he suspect it?
The guard at the garage exit was different today. The man on the bench at the stop-light. The joggers at the park. The slightest, slightest hum over the car radio from the interference of the GPS tracker. The van across the street from the walk bridge.
Were they giveaways? Was he suspicious? Had he given up? Or was it all just... too easy?
Maybe it didn't take being clever to be a Red. Maybe it didn't take anything at all. Maybe anyone could, and would, make dead drops in the park for Russians if offered the right kind of money.
Name your price.
"Red's at the House."
He walked down the path in the park. Past the joggers. Past the van. His eyes darted, wide, bugged, like a doe. He marked the "Matterson's Old Bridge" sign with a small rectangle of white tape. One fluid movement. Taped, dropped. A small black garbage bag, white draw-string. Fell beneath the bridge into the leaves and the grass. And Red moved on. What a strange van, did he think to himself? I've never seen those joggers before?
"Wolf. Wolf. Wolf. Confirm, go."
In the parking garage, the florescent bulb died. Sizzle and out. The shadows turned and dimmed over the empty parking spot.
In the alleyway two blocks behind Robert Hanssen's house, a piece of white tape stuck to the wheel of a kid's bicycle.
On the phone on a desk on the third floor of the FBI building, the voicemail light flashed red under a single emergency light.
At a house in the suburbs of Washington DC, a single nightstand lamp turned on and cast long shadows over an empty bed.
"What took you so long?" |
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Inkdrinker
Scribe
Sepulcher: a stage enlived by ghosts.
Posts: 908
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Post by Inkdrinker on Jul 2, 2014 22:45:41 GMT -5
She called herself Red. Everything about her was red: from her hair, the color of cherry hard candy; to the way she dressed, maroon skinny jeans and a ruby T-shirt with a V-neck that didn't stop for hours. The city was in a heatwave, and everywhere you went, it was hot, humid, and sticky. A miserable dream of a midsummer night. The little aluminum fan on my desk whirred in feeble resistance. Her lipstick was smeared on thick, as if applied out of a jar with a butter knife. I thought it might melt and run down her chin in this damned heat. I'll let you guess what color it was. Red declined to sit down when I offered, instead opting to lean against the door frame.
“Mr. Woodsman” she said, glancing at the nameplate resting on my desk, “I have a problem.” I smiled, informed her that problems were my business, and that she could call me Mark, and double checked that she really didn't want to take a seat. She was quite alright standing. Red took a liberal gulp of the heavy air before continuing. “I'm being followed, you see. I work delivery, taking things from place to place... He's always there, like he knows the routes before I do...” The obvious thing to ask was why she had not taken this matter to the police, but I already knew the answer: they hadn't taken her seriously. It was always the same story, really. Nobody could trust a cop in this day and age, anyway. So I took the next step and inquired as to whether she had shared a relationship with her stalker prior to these events, a coworker perhaps, or merely an acquaintance. Stalkers usually had history with their prey. Red avoided my gaze, her eyes darting around the room. If she were someone else I would have thought she was lying, but I didn't get that impression from Red. Nervous, sure, but not untruthful. “That's just the thing. This guy, he-- he wears this mask. It's like a wolf's face, y'know? Only all twisted.” She had had my attention, but now she had my curiosity.
My role in this case was to be twofold: I would figure who out the mysterious masked figure actually was, and then I would make sure he left Red alone for good. A more subtle man, or one with a cleverer brain might have devised some grand plan, to unmask the wolf-man without him even knowing. But I wasn't that man. In my years of experience I had learned a couple of things, and one of them was that sometimes you could save yourself some trouble, and tedious hours of investigative work, just by asking the right person the right question at the right time. Maybe I was just feeling a little bit dangerous: stupid, in other words. But at any rate, I knew my course of action.
Red told me her first drop-off point for the next day. I was there before she was. One in a row of lavishly colored townhouses was the target. A thin layer of fog clung to the ground. It was almost nine o'clock. There was no sign of the man in the wolf mask, and in his absence, I was the one who looked like a creep. I did not belong here, not in this neighborhood, not in this part of town. You couldn't even smell trash from where I stood, leaning against a telephone pole. And I had seen stores with no bars over their windows. I sketched the scene in my notebook, for lack of anything else to do, while I awaited the arrival of Red's delivery van.
Red hadn't told me exactly what she in fact delivered, but I found out soon enough. A van, saccharine pink with a decal of a pastel grandmother advertising 'Grandma's Bakery', rounded the corner, and parked across the street a half block away. The box Red carried bore the same color scheme as the van, and contained what I could only assume to be cake. I searched frantically for the man in the lupine mask, but he had still yet to reveal himself. Red made her way to the townhouse, and knocked on the door. Still no sign of the wolf-man. I should have been grateful, but I was anxious. At least I was getting paid by the hour. Idly I wondered where Red had gotten the money from. Unless delivery paid a lot more than I remembered, she was working something else on the side. And business was good. I banished the thoughts from my mind, but when I looked up, Red was gone.
I blinked, mildly bewildered and more than a little concerned. You don't invite the delivery girl in, that's not how it works. Something was wrong here, the pangs in my gut told me so. But needless to say, if I was wrong, if the recipient was just being over-polite, if my stomach was only protesting because I skipped breakfast, then busting into a stranger's house would be a very awkward, and highly illegal, thing to do indeed. I gave it five minutes. Five slow, agonizing minutes. Red did not emerge from the house to tell me everything was fine, or that there was no wolf-man, that she'd just been on acid. So I approached the door with a hurried jog.
I knocked twice to no response, so I tried the handle, finding it unlocked, to my surprise. I stepped in cautiously, drawing deep breaths to calm myself. The house was a suburban nightmare, muted off-white everything, with flashes of neon for accent. Three eggshell walls, the fourth vibrant magenta. A cream couch with an aqua throw pillow. There was no sign of Red, or anyone else for that matter, in the opening sitting room, so I turned left down a hallway that looked like it lead to the kitchen. I called out her name, my voice echoing through the still air. Nothing.
In the kitchen, off the hallway in galley style, there was a familiar flowery pink box. It labeled itself 'Grandma's Bakery', and the old woman on the logo smiled with artificial pride. Picking up the pace, I moved on from the kitchen. The townhouse was built tall, not wide, and there was nothing else on this floor, just the carpeted stairs up at the end of the hall. Almost jogging now, I made my way up: three doors. Two bedrooms and a bathroom, if I had to guess. As futile as my desk fan against the heat, I called her name again. But my confidence was wavering, and my voice was unsteady. I began to sweat as I cleared the first bedroom, and the bathroom after it. Was she really in the last place I would look?
I greased the door handle to the final room with the sweat on my palm, but it was locked. If there was anyone in there, they had no doubt already heard me. No point in being subtle any longer, I muttered to myself, as justification for my next action. The place was built cheap, and the hinges came off easily, after one or two slams. Red lie limp on the bed, her very essence, her ruby blood, was seeping into the off-white sheets. There was a huge chunk of her neck missing, and her eyes were dead. I had seen sights more gruesome in my time, but none so fresh. I felt sick.
The wolf-man knelt over her, cutting off pieces of her with a kitchen knife, and stuffing them under his mask, into his mouth. My faced soured as the sound of demonic chewing filled my ears. I reached for my gun, comfortably tucked in my shoulder holster. The creature took notice of me, and turned its head. I could see bloodshot eyes peering through the eye holes in the mask. It was not a he, it was an it. It had been consuming her savagely, and without concern. Her blood was all over it: trailing from under its warped mask, caking its hands... It screamed at me, but it was not a scream. No, it was a howl. I had my gun in my hand now, the safety was off. I did not hesitate. I fired until the magazine was empty.
There was only one thing I needed to know now. I crouched down over the corpse of the wolf creature, and wrapped my hands around its vile mask. It came loose without much effort. The resemblance was immediate, and uncanny. This was no wolf: it was Grandma.
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on Jul 9, 2014 14:24:37 GMT -5
Inkdrinker’s Review:
If the delivery girl looks anything like the Red I was picturing, you -absolutely- invite the delivery girl in. That little throwaway line felt like a missed opportunity.
That said, I loved this piece. It’s almost exactly what I was hoping for from this combination. I really like the hard-boiled detective angle, the talking directly to the reader, all that good stuff. It may have been the obvious choice, but I think that’s because it was the right one.
I wish it had been a little longer; perhaps involved more investigation, and red herring or two before the big twist ending, but I understand the limitations of both time and the competition, so I’m not holding it against you.
My only real gripe is that at the end it became a little difficult if this was taking a supernatural turn (ie: a werewolf) or if something else was going on. Specifically because you mentioned that the wolf-creature was an “it” when fact is it was a woman. I think a little clarity there would have been better.
All that aside, I read the whole thing with a giant smile on my face. It was Noir as hell and I really enjoyed it.
Kaez’s Review:
And then?!
You know, for just crapping something out at the last minute you still managed to pull me in. But, yeah, you definitely hate Noir. I just didn’t see any in there. Great start to an intriguing spy story though. I don’t have a lot to say for it or even much in the way of advice; it was well written and interesting, but it was neither Noir, nor did it feel like it quite did much with the source material aside from use the names.
However, if you ever felt like fleshing it out and finishing it, I’d definitely read it.
A piar of pretty solid stories from the Hobo Thunderdome, both more than I expected and you’re both very talented writers. This one goes to Inkdrinker for the butter knife lipstick… Ugh, so perfectly vivid.
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