Question and Answer

Warning contains Violence and Heavy Language

“You sure this is the place?” I ask my wife, Jennifer, as we pull up on a rather conspicuous suburban house. One of those ones your uncle lives in down the road from you, never having anyone over.

“Yep,” Short, quick, and to the point. She leaves the car unprompted, power walking to the front door. I sit in the passenger seat of my own car confounded. What happened to the plans, going through the questions, at least letting me look at the documents?

She’s been like this all day, and it’s getting on my nerves. After we blew the Louisiana case, we promised we’d never work one together when we were ticked at each other. Yeah, I get it already, hun. I shouldn’t have gotten blackout drunk and arrived late in the morning. I check myself in the mirror. Oh boy, I look ghastly. My tuft above my balding head is a mess, I look pale and sickly, and my eyes are bloodshot.

“Carl!” Jen shouts. I fix up my hair a bit and jog to catch up to her. This wouldn’t be the first time after a bender.

As I stand next to her and get my professional face on, she already rings the doorbell. “What about a plan? Your dad is not going to be happy with us if we blow it again,” I grumble at her.

Geoffrey, her father, is a hard-by-the-books type of police chief and hates when guys get off scot-free on a technicality. He prefers to nail them for those technicalities. Maybe in another life, he could have been a prosecutor because it seemed like he was doing their jobs for them in most cases he was involved in. Either way, his precinct funds our private eye agency making him our hard-ass boss. We get our agency to get hired and investigate around the country but we do a lot of cases for his precinct, and the deal goes: don’t make him look bad.

           “Don’t worry about that. I have one. Just follow my lead and let me know if you recognize anything,” she says side glancing at me straight-faced.

I raise my eyebrow, “Recognize what?” My arms pantomime my outraged confusion. Oh lord, she thinks I’m cheating, right?

The door opens quickly to a small skuzzy balding guy. Oh, I hope to God she doesn’t think this is who I had an affair with. I stand up straight and put my professional face on.

“Hello, Paul Clover? Detectives Weber and Weber. You have time to answer a few questions?”

The man looks aghast. Perhaps I’ve never seen a man drop his jaw lower. Whatever he did, he did it. No questions about it. I’ve seen tweakers with pockets full of drugs put on a better game face.

He looks me up and down, “Uhm… uh. Uhm.” His body shakes as he hides half of it behind his front door.

“If we can come in for a few minutes, we can get this over with,” she says with her professional face, then walks in and pushes past him. Reckless…Oh well, play along. I walk in and shoot the guy a smile with my hands in my trench coat pockets.

The guy stares me up and down, eyes flittering. He tries not to make eye contact as Jennifer sits on his couch, nonchalant. 

“So, wh-what are you two brother and sis-sister or something?”

“Nah husband and wife, we’re a rarity in the field.” I burst out with a smile. Still 15 years proud doing this job with her. 

               “Well, aren’t you going to be a polite host and offer us food?” Jennifer says staring dead-eyed at this guy. Okay, this is how she acted when she found out about Angela. Maybe it hasn’t been the happiest 15 years. Next is the Vodka thrown in everyone’s eyes.

               “She’s an ex-marine sniper. I wouldn’t mess with her.” The guy gives me a scared puppy look.

“Yeah, just let me look for some decent meat in the freezer.” He says short of breath. He walks off to a door down the hall and slams the door behind him. We hear his footsteps down some stairs to a basement.

“He’s going to run,” I say with a sigh.

“Just have a look around,” Jen interjects back.

I shrug my shoulders. This had better be worth throwing the case down the drain. Taking a look around the living room, everything screams bachelor from alcohol bottles on the end tables to the generic cream color of the walls. All strangely familiar, hard to say whether because it’s what you’d expect to be in a generic house or déjà vu. Most of the shelves were barren like he hasn’t lived here long or scrubbed the place. The kitchen is stocked with cheap wears, and barely a gas station burger in the refrigerator. I hear crashes from below like he keeps a pet raccoon, just knowing he’s probably trying to run.

Then I check the napkin drawer, cheap brown paper rags you’d find as towels from a gas station bathroom, and a strangely yellow edge sticking out in between them. I pull out a manila envelope. It’s not even sealed. Oh, God. I pull out printed photos to see laminated photos of Jen’s dad, aka my boss, with… a lot of unclothed bodies. The pictures peering through the window to the scene taking place in multiple spreads-- figuratively and literally. I recognize half of these people. Some are police officers at the local precinct and the most damning is the blonde. We got her and her boyfriend arrested for dealing heroin. What in God’s name did we just stumble onto? Jen can’t know this. This might wreck her. Her father is the only family she has left. I’ll get this to Geoff with whatever I can find on this guy so we can handle this quietly.

I stuff the pictures in my coat pocket and walk back to the living room. “So what are we dealing with, a squatter?”

She nods her head towards the key rack next to the front door with an exasperated throat clear. A press badge hangs down from it in neon blue. I rub my temples, knowing she just watched me check every place except that one while she stared it down the whole time. Investigating, it shows he’s an independent journalist representing a website I have never heard of.

“Already checked the website on it, a niche anti-corruption site where all the writers seem to be the same person. Incoherent blogpost-style articles, and gets lots of naysayers. Plus it was referenced on The Post some years back as a misinformation source.” We hear hammering under us breaking up our conversation.  

“So what, nobody knows it?”

“Surprisingly, it gets 200,000 clicks per month according to some web traffic trackers. Mostly, trolls and death threats though if you look at the comments. Talking in the thousands”

So we are talking about a guy desperate for a real scoop, but nobody will believe him, turns to blackmail. Probably to get my good old father-in-law to fess up with his article to finally prove his impotent “Legitimacy,” probably hiding out here from people doxxing him. But how did he find anything on Jen’s dad?

We hear a large crash from below us, and my hand naturally goes for the gun. “Hold on.” Jen goes for her phone and makes a call. Her face shows suspicion as I’m left dumbfounded about who she’d be calling right now. As her phone rings we hear ringing from below us in time. I see her face turn to pain, and I stand shocked. Did she really just call this guy or was that a coincidence, why would she know this sleaze’s number– a failed wannabe reporter?

She’s anti-corruption. She always has been and it’s been one of her driving forces in being a detective and marine, if she didn’t get injured years back in service and had to retire she would have been on an internal investigations committee for the military, instead she became a detective to root out corruption in society.

           My mind starts answering the questions itself. We’ve done dirty deals before to get people arrested, but this, selling out your own father? But wait, what about me? They were acting too casual. I’m the scapegoat for this. I hold back my body from going into fight or flight mode. I fight myself from thinking she’s behind the photos. I stare her down as she stares at me with a regretful glint. She can’t. She wouldn’t. I wouldn’t know who she is all these years if it’s true.

In that silent moment, the call ends early as the ringing stops from below. The guy comes out of the basement with two steaks. His eyes dead set on me not willing to leave. I look him up and down for a weapon he’s concealing– nothing.

“London cut good?” He sits on an easy chair near the couch, throwing two cuts on the coffee table in front of Jen.

“Let me see your phone,” I growl pounding my fist on his chair arm. Those photos were only copies, and blackmailers usually have everything backed up. I’ll find out everything I need from it including where he’s from and... if Jen just called him.

I swipe the phone out of his hand and ask “Reporter,’ huh? Where are your hard drives?” Jen looks at my outburst like I’ve lost it.

“Yep.” He says, not another word.

I turn the phone on and it goes from a black screen reflecting me to a home screen of me and my wife. “Th-This is my phone.” I thought I lost it last night at the bar. What the hell is happening?

“So you can call a cab back to hell where you came from.” He remarks from his chair before getting up and grabbing the meat and heading to the kitchen.

I sit on the couch across from Jen, look my phone up and down, and ask her, “Jen, what the hell is going on?”

She shakes her head nearly in tears. I feel a sense of panic as I realize she’s just as confused as I am. She throws the documents from her bag onto the table in front of me. It’s the profile for this guy run through a police scan and a profile in my writing. It’s sparse in details only telling me vital information such as age, birthplace, physical description, work, and current occupation. Finally, an arrest record of multiple battery charges, disturbing the public, and instigating an unlawful gathering with most of the charges oddly dropped or tuned down to a fine. Yet this guy is some meek puppy around us. 

“You had this printed before you went out,” Jen states.

           I break the silence, “Jen… Jen, I don’t know. I don’t remember making this. This isn’t from me. It can’t be. All of yesterday is just a blur, Jen” I’m frazzled, barely able to put my words together. My eyes start welling up.

“Yeah, yesterday…” Jen says dejected, and takes the documents and puts them back in her bag.

 I hear the oven open, several cabinets, the napkin drawer, and then the refrigerator. The guy comes back over and pops open two cold bottles. I don’t think I’ve seen something I need more than right now. I look over the bottle, “Hey, Jaeger, my favorite.” My face drops. I look around at all the bottles around the room, Jaeger, each of them.

Jen’s face is the same as when everything calmed down this morning. Quiet, her mouth widened in pain, unable to look at me, on the verge of saying something but burying it deep down in her deepest core. When I first arrived in the morning she was in tears, yelling at me, hugging me, fist pounding against my chest—sadness, happiness, love, anger.

I stare at the end table next to me. I’m unnerved by something I can’t explain while looking at it. I feel the side of my head pound and I get dizzy. Ornate and decorated in haphazard glasses and bottles with that sense of familiarity that I was asked to find.

I was here. I remember that table and drinking here. Why was I here? What was I trying to do? I remember drinking here, alongside him – laughing. The table, the table feels like a bad omen. 

I get up and pull out my UV light and it reveals a splatter, invisible to the naked eye. I shine the light down the hall revealing a dragging trail to the basement door and look back at our guilty cameraman.

I let out a nervous sigh, pull out my gun, and arm it straight at the camera guy’s head. “Come on, you have a lot of explaining to do.” I look at Jen as I bring him to the basement, “Stay up here, call the cops, and tell them we were having a drink with a friend when we discovered a body and he attacked us.”

“Please, man, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He begs crying and screaming. “Just leave me alone already! I’m sorry about all of it… all of it, please!”

“No, I’m coming down there like it or not,” She says with wild eyes more nervous than I’ve ever seen her around bodies and murderers.

“Jen, come on.”

“No, I’m not having you Lone-gun anymore! I will call afterward.”

I hold the man by the shoulder with the gun in his back and I find myself unable to stop her from going first. I feel trepidation walking down the steps, not knowing if I want answers. I don’t know what we’ll find, but in some sick twisted way, I hope it’s just some old lady who owned this house before he made residence.

Jen stops, mouth covered. I let go of the creep’s shoulder and shine my UV light on the wall she is looking at, revealing me. My body lying in a hole in the brick foundation with my head gashed open, well worn in too. A Mortar bucket and brand new brick lay next to the hole where my body is, with a hammer that tore it down and a shovel that dug out the hole.

My lips tremble and I feel myself start to barrel over, “No. No.” I grab the sleaze by his collar and yell in his face, “What the hell did you do!?”

           “I knew it,” Jen says staring at my body.

I turn my head to Jen and weep, “Jen, no.” My face distorted to the point of pain, “What the hell sort of joke is this you sick bastard!” I yell at the sleaze.  

Jen’s face twists and she knees him in the crotch bringing the sleaze down then cuffing him to the furnace.

“I didn’t know what else to do, man, I didn’t know what else to do… I never meant...” He pleads groaning in pain.

           “You’ve been gone for days...” Jen says with tears rolling down her embroiled face looking over to me and staring me dead in the eyes.

It’s almost as though I feel all the air leave my lungs, my throat hoarse from yelling. I kneel over from the dizziness. I look up and while recovering myself and see a letter sticking out in my body’s coat pocket. I drop my gun unconsciously as the guy stares with morbid curiosity and I’m drawn towards my body and lift the letter.

           It’s addressed to our house and the sender is Paul Clover. What an idiot. Did we really do so many bad things that this guy, of all people, caught up to us? I look back at Jen with tears in her eyes unable to hold her weeps in between her enraged face and everything turns to blinding light. I know she will do something horrible but I feel comfort in knowing it’s not my job to stop her– maybe even relishing in what she’ll do. Her hand reaches out for me, skin melting to bone.