Skin the Cat Read online

  The Bluegrass Darkly Series

  © 2019 All rights reserved. R. Sean McGuirk. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  ISBN 978-1-54397-840-7 eBook 978-154397-841-4

  Affectionately for my friend, mentor and world-acclaimed editor

  Benee Knauer,

  for without whom this book would have never been written.

  Skin the cat (idiomatic expression, def.): The availability of more than one technique to achieve an identical outcome.

  “There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream.”

  -Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! -1855

  “She was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat.”

  -Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court -1889

  Table of Contents

  Revenge

  The DetectiveFive Months Earlier

  The Unreal

  Dirty Deeds-Story Mount, Kentucky

  A Rural Way of Living

  Everything Under the Sun

  Fast Hands, Loaded Gun

  Bait and Switch

  Chumley’s

  Pennies, Nickels and Dimes

  Designed for this sh…

  Girl from the trailer park

  Bury the truth

  Things that Sting

  Watch me

  New evidence

  Off the Record

  Seeing only Inward

  A Fresh Kill

  Damn, Girl

  Missing

  Ka-Boom

  Colorblind Rainbows

  Skin…

  Who are you?

  Into the Night

  Liar

  Skin the…

  Reverse

  I Don’t Talk

  A Place that Crawls

  Planting Lilacs

  Skin the Cat

  A Real Motive

  The Poetry of Murder

  Again and Again

  Steam

  Get You First

  Doorbell

  Bait

  Four Minutes

  A Spilled Bucket of Diamonds

  Climb Back Down

  No. Yes. No.

  Nothing Left to Hide

  Flowers

  Vanity

  1

  Revenge

  I’d waited for this day since he ruined everything. The original plan began as a vague notion that took shape over time, a black blossom unfolding into the very specific idea of real violence. From there, the whole thing grew on its own. No water needed. No light given. Just me surrendering to the idea of killing them. Nothing could have stopped this. It came alive in my mind like something electrical, untamed and primal: Revenge. So vivid and so close. I could reach out and nick it open with the tip of my blade. And yes, the blood. The blood pumping in your veins. The blood pumping in mine. Blood remained the last great equalizer. It made us all the same person. See, when I came at you with my scalpel, all the other shit went right out the window. The color of the new Land Rover, the exclusive memberships, sprawling country clubs, portfolios brimming with stock options, corporate kickbacks, obnoxious luxury seaside vacation homes, ski trips, private schooling, life coaches, the finest clothes, elite brands, boutique travel, boutique spas, boutique surgeons, being seen with the right people at the right time…when I jumped out and sliced your neck open, the only thing that mattered was stemming the blood flow. You should thank me. I made you human again.

  Things were going so well, exactly according to plan. I was so close to paradise. My escape. Then he stepped in and ruined everything. Shade. And so now? The bitch must die. He must die. And so I waited, on this hidden side of a dilapidated shed. I struggled to my feet, sliding up, sweat leaking into my eyes, the searing rural Kentucky heat baking me inside my clothes. This festering, boiling little hick town. Where a prehistoric meteor had rammed into the face of the Cumberland Mountains, leaving a hole now called Story Mount, Kentucky. And inside it, with an angry sun rising, the morning now finding all things within an inch of brittle combustion. On my toes and leaning to the side to peer across the street, her window curtains lay still, no movement inside. I let my fingertips slide across the stubble on my scalp as I sank back to my feet, and caught my reflection in a busted window pane laying in the dirt. Skinny. Hard face. My jaws sticking out, the flesh sunken in. Who was this staring back? I’d transformed. I’d become anybody but me. Possibly nobody at all. Like a fucking ghost. Erased. The delivery truck would be here soon enough. I’d nab her. Then I would kill him while she watched. Then I’d kill her. Why? He ruined everything. For blood remains the great equalizer and faith without works is dead. I took my blade, nicked open my thumb, tasted the blood, and waited…

  2

  The Detective

  Five Months Earlier

  It all began when I caught my wife having sex with a stranger in our bed. I’d returned a day early from a business trip to surprise her. And wow, were we all surprised. I swung open the door to find Emily on top of him, swaying, glowing with the sheen of naked sweat, her eyes fluttering in ecstasy.

  Young, not more than twenty years old, the boy could scarcely be considered a man. He’d called me “Sir” when he jumped out of my bed, wadded his clothes under his arm and bounded down the steps bare-assed naked. A seasoned detective specializing in insurance fraud for over a decade, I’d become one of the best in the industry…but I never saw this one coming. And that’s what really hurt. Because I felt I was brilliant at what I did for a living. I’d caught the best of them and steadily added the notches to my belt: The man paralyzed from the waist down because of a worksite injury awarded a million-dollar worker’s comp claim; busted playing goalie in a soccer tournament. Shuffling, sprinting and kicking the ball with an impressive pair of muscular legs, no wheelchair in sight. The couple who received a four million-dollar settlement against the builder of their mansion, which burned to the ground due to a faulty electrical outlet. The husband’s fingerprints found later on an aerosol can of accelerant jammed inside the remains of the basement heating unit. A decade spent tracking down and snagging a creep-show of hoodlums, con artists, hustlers, arsonists and murderers, closing cases at a nine-out-of-ten rate, my peers described me as something close to telepathic. I prided myself on the ability to spot the subtle idiosyncrasies no one else saw, catching the little twists in the larger pattern, teasing out the single key piece of evidence that cracked a case wide open. Yet somehow, I hadn’t the faintest premonition a complete stranger was in my bed screwing my wife. The shock was instant and thermonuclear, my entire self-concept melting into something indescribable, liquidly radioactive and mutated. The detective now defective.

  Everyone at my employer Frisk Investigations Limited got wind of it. My colleagues lined up across the days asking me in one way or another, the same exact question: “So what’d you do?” Did I beat him to a pulp with a broom handle. Did I move out? Did I throw my wife out? But when I answered with, It’s what I didn’t do, shoulders fell, eyes glazed over and they filed out one by one. Failing to nurture a balanced homelife, and walking headlong into a divorce, was every cop’s worst fear. Wherever I walked in the office, I felt whispers of speculation gathering in, like some persistent, dark curse. I could only imagine the exchanges between them. “You know what he said?” I imagined the mouths leaning into ears, “He actually said ‘It’s what I didn’t do.’ God, I hope that never happens to me.”


  “What I didn’t do” turned out to be an ugly list that landed us into marital counseling. The promotion came three years earlier. The new arrangement hit my bank account like a steroid, that contractual clause that guaranteed me a percentage cut of money and property recovered was steadily making me rich. The rub? The position required travel two-thirds of the time. And I loved it. Shade Bardane lighting across the clouds in a private jet, an investigator made famous in his own mind. And forgetting the two kids and the wife at home. I’d stopped going to holiday gatherings, missed anniversaries, forgot birthdays, and arrived to recitals and soccer games so late they’d already ended. But I didn’t see it until I practically landed on the naked college boy in my bed. And now I understood: Detective Shade Bardane, the man who abandoned his family.

  After much pain, I finally admitted to the counselor and my wife Emily what he called “my part in it.” The fling was not justified, but rather I had to learn I alone made the conditions for an affair ideal. Maybe my wife had been the victim after all. Possibly, I was a self-absorbed jackass, just another vanilla flavor of some dumb cop-turned-investigator who got it all wrong. No matter how much I was to blame, seeing Emily there wrestling in the bed with a guy roughly half my age never left my mind. It destroyed me.

  Her scent used to be my aphrodisiac, but now it triggered reruns of lust, her glimmering, rocking nakedness rolling in the sheets with that stupid kid. The visual loop was so painful I would literally see red, like some variation of PTSD, as if the marrow inside my bones were inflamed. Counseling had been great for Emily. But as she grew better, I became worse. After several weeks, when the idea of bashing my head into a wall sounded most reasonable, I decided to self-medicate. I dialed up the Bardane family gene pool, the black scales of alcoholism DNA roped liquidly across the surface of my psyche and plunged its fangs deeply into the nucleus of my soul. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tress. My grandfather had been buried in his coffin with an unopened bottle of Bourbon tucked under one arm—to better enjoy the rites of passage to the Netherworld. In my early stages of what I named alcohol therapy, I swore liquor was helping to heal me, to mend my mortally wounded soul. And maybe for a while it did. But in the end, booze turned out to be a big, damned lie.

  Early one morning, I’d signed out an evidence box from the Chicago Police Department pertaining to a collaborative investigation. The original copies of wire transactions and phony accounts were critical to the capture and conviction of a white-collar thief inside a corporate embezzlement scheme worth a half million. This was the last day I believed that alcohol was the answer, because a few dark taverns and a single blackout later, I’d lost the entire evidence file with Chicago Police Department stamped all over it. A Good Samaritan found it laying scattered in the parking lot of some dive. That helped hold the criminal case together but it didn’t do much for my credibility. The following day my boss Semalina Rodriguez spotted me near my desk as I wandered in about noon. Her eyes were black with fury.

  “Shade, get your ass in my office right now,” she growled. I went in and sat down. She slammed the door shut and took a seat behind her desk, glaring at me. A cold claw reached down into my gut and I dry heaved into my hand. Alcohol fumes seeped from every pore. I wasn’t hungover from he night before. I was still drunk.

  “Detective, do you ever check your phone anymore?” Rodriguez shrieked. It was so unexpected and out of character. I fished my phone from the inside pocket of my sports coat and held it close to my face trying to read through dry contacts and bloodshot eyes. A number of missed calls. Double digits. But I couldn’t make out how many. Sema dug in with her eyes and pursed her lips in disbelief. I’d crossed the line. The one you only get to cross once.

  “What?” I shrugged, my face going slack.

  “Exactly what in the hell is wrong with you?” She reclined in her chair and tossed her hair back, pissed. “Have you lost your damn mind?”

  “What?”

  “Jesus, what is that?” She waved her hand at the air. “Good God. Is that really you Shade? You smell like a distillery. Why didn’t you call me the instance you lost that evidence file?”

  “What?” I tightened my fist on my mouth to keep the nausea at bay, staring at the floor. I hadn’t the faintest clue and shook my head. “An evidence file?”

  It didn’t seem possible, but Rodriguez’ face grew darker. She didn’t say anything but with a soft kick rolled backwards in her office chair, pressed her index fingers together at her lips and stared at me, face crooked with disbelief. Her expression was searching, and mystified, as if I might be some exotic, new disease evolving right before her eyes. She snapped a button on her office phone and it buzzed.

  “Tony?” she sighed. “Sema Rodriguez. Yes. You too. Great. Yes, it did. Be sure to thank Merianne for me. Listen. Are there any breathalyzers in the lab? I mean on site? Yeah? The blow type?” She paused, kissing her lips to smooth out the lipstick. “Mind to run one up? Excellent. Thanks.”

  Forget about driving a car. Forget about even standing up. My blood alcohol levels were astronomical. And I didn’t receive the news in what might be considered a ‘proactive’ fashion. I jumped out of my seat, flapped my arms and jabbed my fingers at Tony and Rodriguez, and shouted about a conspiracy. I shouted about a set up. About being framed. That the machine was faulty. Some part of me believed the louder I got, the more I could create truth just by bending the lies with enough force. I stammered and protested until I fell into my seat, floppy as a rag doll.

  “Just,” Rodriguez said pinched the bridge of her nose. “Shade, just shut up. Don’t talk for a while, okay?” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. The she picked up the phone.

  To cover me from being reported to the state licensing board for misplacing evidence, and being terminated and losing my entire career, my boss placed a call over to the CPD fifth district, where her second cousin Marayna Collins served as night Commander and also where this case originated. Rodriguez went all happy, the conversation speckled with dashes of laughter as she asked about a shared aunt, a church program and all the grandkids. My head on the chopping block, I held very still. With a couple of promises and an exchange of favors, Sema bartered the situation down to a simple case of administrative error. She hung up the phone and sat shaking her head at me. I was hurt, humiliated and puzzled. Moments ago I’d been defiant about my innocence. Now I just caved in.

  “Sema,” I spoke into my lap, the shame coming on like a glowing ember. “I blew it.”

  I brought my eyes up. She stared at me unblinking. “Look, if every detective who went through a rough patch lost their job, our entire industry would cave in and go extinct. That being said, I have to save face. Our agency’s reputation is at stake because of you. On our side, a case is going to trial and we failed our client’s request and missed a critical deadline. You’re immediately suspended. Unpaid.”

  I nodded my head, long and slow. She studied me in a brief silence, and I imagined my appearance, the crumpled sweaty blazer, the wrinkled jeans, reeking of half-digested liquor. Rodriguez stirred in her seat and spoke. “Do me a favor Shade?”

  My voice cracked. “Yeah?”

  “Just unfuck yourself.”

  She was right. The alcohol no longer worked. My blood alcohol levels were sky-high and I had nothing to show for it except extreme pain chopped up with intermittent black outs. My problems with Emily weren’t going away on their own. They were just frozen in time while our kids Brant and Lilly hung out in limbo and suffered. That was the part I hated most. Why should the kids have to suffer the consequences brought on by the adults? It wasn’t fair. If not for my adulteress Emily, I would do it for little Lilly and Brant. Tossing out the liquor bottles would be the first step. With Rodriguez watching, I dialed Emily, explained to her exactly what happened, the evidence box, the black out, the breathalyzer, and the unpaid suspension. Not in the mood to listen to her perspectives or her pa
in, I hung up. Somewhere on the edge of panic an office assistant drove me from work straight to the hospital. By nightfall, I’d been admitted to the nearest inpatient rehab facility that accepted my insurance.

  Twenty-eight days later, in my first official A.A. meeting, I uttered “My name is Shade, and I’m an alcoholic.” Once spoken aloud, some heavy load that I wasn’t aware of until that moment suddenly lifted off me and I could suddenly breathe. Not long after that, it got even better. Inside that tiny room of dark despair that became my marriage, relentless couple’s counseling cracked open a new unseen door, one that Emily wasn’t hiding behind, and climbing all over some boy. Yes, the first sliver of hope shined in but with it came with a simple question. The counselor stopped tapping his pen on his notepad, tugged his rust-colored beard, threw a glance at Emily and then put his full gaze on me. After a long pause, his orange eyebrows jumped high on the forehead.

  “You still love her, don’t you?” he quipped.

  I lifted my hands in the air as if I had an announcement to make and soon dropped them when no answer came. My mind absorbed the question slowly, like water spilled across white linen, that long moment just before the material suddenly soaks it in. Initially stupefied, the answer just came. And it was simple.

  “Yes, I love her very much.”

  He folded his hands in his lap and leaned way in, focused only on me. “Then that my friend, is our starting point.

  The counselor explained the damage couldn’t be undone. That day would remain there always like a scar. But it would fade with time. Though in moments of anger we might be tempted to scratch it back open. Under his direction, we imagined what a functional, post-adultery marriage might look like. He told us to give up all hope of recapturing the glory of our former relationship. He emphasized that for people like us, things never returned to ‘old normal’ again, and quickly added, nor should it. Having been brought to the brink, where despair stretched in all directions, the only beacon of hope glimmered not in the dead past, but shined toward the future. Here he urged us then and there, to create a “new normal”. And we did.