A constant hurry infected the streets of Chicago. It was a perpetually congested city with an impatient populace in need of being somewhere else immediately just to stay up with life, a high-rent lakeside anthill with a picturesque skyline. The noise of traffic as people went about their business was a constant hum on any street, a droning note that the residents learned eventually to tune out, lest it drive them mad. It had its share of multiple millionaires and drop-outs, its hard-working people and its socialites, celebrities, criminals, miscreants, and the maladjusted. Anything in the world could be had within arm’s length at any time. It had traditions and folklore, ghosts and demons in its present and past, and an underbelly that befit it all.
It was a stiflingly hot and humid day, befitting a jungle urban or otherwise, and a faint odor of rotting hung in the air. Malcolm suspected that somewhere in the next alley over, some rats were getting their fill of something that was edible a day or two ago. There were plenty of restaurants in the area, and it could be that none of them have had their garbage picked up for a day or two. With every step he took, the smell got worse.
The sun shone almost intolerably brightly, piercing as it reflected from the mirrored windows of skyscrapers and the windshields of cars. Malcolm had to shield his eyes even from the light reflected from the pale yellow brick Chicago builders seemed to favor in a particularly prolific and aesthetically disappointing period of urban development. Malcolm wondered if some brickyard must have had a special on it. The streets were filled with bleary-eyed young urbanites who sipped five dollar coffees in paper cups with plastic lids on the way to drop the kids at daycare and get to the office. Chicago seemed to run on high-end caffeine. Shops that sold those five dollar coffees seemed to be on every block, and flourished wherever they were opened.
All of this told Malcolm it was another place he didn’t fit in. He couldn’t claim to be a part of the schedules and interactions of the city. He almost believed himself to be a guest symbiote in the great organism that is the brick and mortar, the steel and asphalt and the people that were the organism of the city. Sometimes he felt that no matter where he went, he was the object of strange looks, wayward glances, and incomprehension from first sight. Most people came to the city for jobs, or the night life, his path to this city had been far different, but this is where he’d landed, and where he seemed to be needed.
Malcolm needed milk, and so he headed to The Convenient Store, an aptly named grocery that was staffed by the owner and his family. It was five blocks from his apartment with two turns, and his route featured two blocks on Foster. He hated major streets like Foster for the information overload, but he had no way of avoiding it. When he made the turn, he took a deep breath, shielded his eyes and walked on.
A constant assault of textual over-stimulation and visual information which barraged Malcolm’s hyperlexic mind with messages. Even simple things jumped into his mind, had to be processed before being filed away forever in his memory. “Closed,” “Sale,” and “New summer Fashions” screamed at him, while most people completely overlooked them. Some of these messages came from human agencies, but some of them came from a far more occulted source that had never been clear to him. Inwardly, he trudged, as if he was walking against a blizzard.
Along with the requisite coffee shop, this block featured a clothing resale shop, and an almost as obligatory Polish restaurant. A Polish man with a limited English vocabulary stood in its doorway, passing out papers advertising the restaurant, which were mostly discarded a block ahead, most not even hitting the garbage can, an exercise in futility. Malcolm pocketed the one he was handed quickly, never looking at it. There must have been two dozen in his files at home, collected while working various cases. It was the first time he’d seen this particular man, and the momentary contact with his hand brought Malcolm the image of him, tyrant, beating his five year old son for wetting the bed, an act his son did for attention. The image was not of his concern, but would never be forgotten, but filed to an area of his brain reserved for memories that were none of his business. Malcolm had long ago learned to keep his mind pure of problems that aren’t his.
Malcolm had to walk this street with a carefully trained tunnel vision to make any forward progress whatsoever, had to limit his intake in order to make it all comprehensible. He needed milk for his cereal. That was all he needed, then he could start his day and go to work. He didn’t need the billboards, the advertisements for thousand dollar watches or overpriced jeans for which were placed in bus kiosks. Their target market was apparently people that are not able to afford cars in the city. He didn’t need the neon signs in the windows of every market and liquor store, the sandwich boards with the special of the day in front of every restaurant and bar, or a weathered Sun-Times newspaper box proclaiming “Hospital Evacuated Due to Mystery Illness,” (and affixed to this, the stickers for a band, Geostationary, defunct several months ago due to band politics and the bass player sleeping with the guitar player’s girlfriend).
Everywhere was that smell of rotting. Urban decay. Flesh being stripped from an animal, a person, a neighborhood.
Finally he arrived at the store, walked past the front windows and their ads for cigarettes and alcohol. The smell was now unbearable, flies swarmed in the air near the door, which opened diagonally out to the heart of the intersection. He made a familiar half-turn to the door, but was stopped before entering. A pair of police officers blocked the way seeming rather serious about keeping people out.
“Sorry buddy, store’s closed,” one of the officers said, keeping his eyes on Malcolm.
Malcolm was confused. He wasn’t sure if this was some kind of joke, or if this was a Chicago cop feeling big today. Either way, Malcolm just needed his milk, and didn’t need this problem. His muscles tensed a little bit more, he was about to press past the police officers and into the store when the door opened and a stocky man in plain clothes stepped out backwards, dragging a whirring fan and talking to somebody inside.
The two officers at the door tried to at once cover their noses and continue to be a physical barrier to Malcolm. They stepped aside, stretched their arms out and carefully prevented Malcolm from seeing whatever might be going on inside, or who was coming out. This was the first that Malcolm knew that something was not right, the way they were preventing him from even getting a glimpse in. That wasn’t a good sign. The smell of rotting, however, was suddenly stronger and Malcolm suspected the source was somewhere inside.
“Okay, enough complaining,” the man in plainclothes said impatiently. “We’ll prop the doors open, but it better not contaminate the scene.”
Malcolm didn’t want to recognize the voice, but he did. It belonged to Detective Nami, Chicago Police Homicide division. His presence meant something unfortunate had happened.
With the fan in position holding the door open just enough, the man turned and pulled two rolls of yellow police-line tape from under his arm. He handed the rolls to the officers stationed outside. Apparently in this scene, they were the lucky ones. They looked blandly at the rolls as if he was sticking them with garbage duty.
“Start taping off the doorway,” he said. When they didn’t jump to it, he added, “Or I’ll make you wait inside with us.” The officers regained their composure and started unrolling the tape.
Nami turned around, gulping air to clear his senses. He looked lightheaded and pale. Even though the smell of rotting and death was routine in his line of work, even he was overwhelmed by the air inside the store.
Detective Nami was a tall, stocky Asian man. Wispy hair was slowly vacating the top of his head, but he’d long since given up trying to find a hairstyle that would in some way hide the fact of it. Corpses and cops didn’t care about receding hairlines, so he figured he shouldn’t either. He was dressed in his usual basic suit, nothing special or flashy. He chose his work clothes to be functional, and only cops in TV shows dressed like they were on a runway. On this sweltering summer day, he was certainly overdressed, but the police force dictates a certain professional decorum. He caught his breath and looked up, noticing the one person the crime scene has already attracted. He wondered how they found these things so quickly, it wasn’t like they advertised. It took a second for Malcolm’s face to register on Nami, he was out of context as a bystander.
“Malcolm? What the hell are you doing here?” he said, only partially surprised. Malcolm always seemed to be around when he was needed, but he had no idea why. He then added under his breath, “How’d you hear about this?”
“Hear about what? I just need some milk and eggs.”
Nami took this as one of Malcolm’s peculiar little jokes, even if it wasn’t particularly funny. Malcolm’s delivery always confused Nami. Malcolm could give stone face pointers to Buster Keaton.
Nami opened the door and led Malcolm into the store. Malcolm’s eyes first fell on the body, its eyes staring back at him, open. They had sunk into their sockets slightly. He just barely recognized its face as that of the shopkeeper, Fadil. His body was twisted and gaunt, far more skeletal than he’d looked like in life. You couldn’t see the hard outline of bones on him when he was alive yesterday. Malcolm turned back away. The possibility that it might have been Fadil that was the victim hadn’t occurred to him outside. He’d been holding out hope that Fadil was being interviewed around back by one of Nami’s assistants, that he was just a witness to someone else’s death.
Nami caught Malcolm’s reaction.
“What is it?”
“Can we at least close his eyes?”
One of the forensics officers who seemed to be directing the detail, looked up to them.
“No, we can’t. The tissue has dried, and won’t flex.”
Malcolm swallowed hard and looked back at the corpse. The smell was far worse in here. The air was clogged by a stench that had driven most of the men to wear breathing masks. The air conditioning, which had been cranked to the fullest, couldn’t filter the rot from the air fast enough. From the smell of it, Malcolm could imagine a horde of insects, vermin and other assorted better-not-thought-of elements of the food chain waiting for the human intrusion to leave the buffet. He saw that they had even opened all of the doors from the coolers to help bring in fresh air, and cool the place to slow the decay. Malcolm didn’t think it could have helped much, all things considered, but at least it was worth trying.
The gathered forensics officers paused in their collection of evidence at the intrusion of this stranger, but resumed their duties when they saw Nami had brought him in. Malcolm and Nami each took latex gloves from a box, snapped them onto their hands and proceeded further into the store.
The soot of the dirty floor grated audibly on the soles of Malcolm’s shoes, but it was always that way here, a friendly layer of unmoppable dirt had always coated the floors, clinging hard to crevices in the pitted and worn tiles. This little independent convenience store might have lacked the modern, hospital-like cleanliness and sterility of the 7-11 down the street, but it had character. White paint peeled from the aluminum ceiling tiles, a holdover from the building’s early days, and a sight that was becoming rarer and rarer in the city. Dusty abandoned cobwebs hung along the edges of the walls. Ziggy cartoons cut from newspapers in the eighties slowly yellowed away underneath a well-worn plastic cover on the counter. The merchandise had settled into slouching piles with a thin coating of dust on dilapidated shelves that were bought second-hand from a closed grocery a decade ago. Even despite this, Malcolm felt that the store had aged greatly since his last visit.
Malcolm took a few more steps into the store, and this was when he first got a good look at the horribly decomposed body, and he had to admit to the fact that he’d lost another friend under less than pretty circumstances, and his only thought was that everything really was going wrong for him today.
The body had putrefied for what looked like weeks, though Malcolm had seen him re-pricing his stock only yesterday. The lips were curled back revealing a horrific caricature of the toothy grin that had greeted customers almost every day since the store opened. The eyes were dried and shriveled, but they still looked back up at Malcolm, a memory that he couldn’t file away into the unimportant parts of his mind.
“Polachek, what have you got for me?” Nami called, breaking Malcolm’s concentration on the body.
A thin dark-haired man standing on the other side of the body looked up through gold spectacles at Nami, then at Malcolm.
“Is he okay here?”
Nami nodded.
“Malcolm, Polachek, Polacheck, Malcolm. He’s helped me out on a few odd cases.” Nami looked at the body and decided to add, “He might be helpful on this one, too.”
Malcolm and Polachek shook hands over the body before Polachek crouched back down to his task.
“Fadil Marak. Egyptian. 47,”he summarized his notes. “By the looks of things, he was stocking the morning’s deliveries when he was attacked. There were no external injuries, no entry wounds. According to the security camera tapes, the time of death couldn’t have been later than 7:30 a.m.”
Nami regarded the putrescent body again, puzzled. It didn’t make any sense.
“7:30 a.m. when? Two months ago?” Nami asks, repulsed. He’d seen many a stinker in his day. How could the body have become like this in only an hour?
Polachek scratched his head and glanced up in confirmation.
“That’s the last time we see him on the security tape. The rate of decay is tremendous. I can’t explain it just yet. But that’s not the only thing I can’t explain—his ribcage—its collapsed.”
Malcolm turned away, not wanting, or needing to see any more. Fadil was dead, that was all he needed, or at least wanted to know on this case. His eyes caught on a small sign in front of the register. It showed a cartoonish teenager, holding up his I.D., and read, “FIND IT.” Malcolm stared at it until Nami’s voice drew his attention back to the situation at hand.
“Who called it in?”
“Some kid called from the payphone by the door, then hung up and took off. Got a couple prints. We’ll run ‘em, see what comes up.”
As Polachek replied, Malcolm turned away again, and saw a lottery sign, featuring a rainbow and a pot of gold, and the words, “STOP IT.”
Nami looked around. A number of fresh boxes lined the aisle, waiting to be stocked, though a closer look revealed them to be moldering as well. A fresh delivery receipt for all of it sat on the counter.
“Maybe the delivery driver saw something,” Nami posited, again breaking Malcolm’s tangential attention, drawing him back to the inner circle. “Let’s see if we can find him.”
Stepping around the body, Nami moved behind the counter, which disturbed Malcolm even more. Fadil should have been behind there, Nami’s presence was an alteration to his expectations that reinforced that something in the world had been irrevocably lost. He imagined Fadil in Nami’s place, moving just as Nami did. It seemed unnatural, Fadil moved in different ways, the simulacra didn’t hold up no matter how hard he imagined.
The Nami-Fadil amalgamation opened the cash register, and then closed it.
“Cash is still here,” Nami’s voice said, and then the façade washed away, it was just Nami, irrevocably Nami.
“So it wasn’t a robbery,” Polachek theorized.
“Not a successful one at any rate.”
Nami rewound the security tape and started it from moments before the event. Malcolm caught a glimpse of a black teenager, his eyes wide with panic, his clothing matching the pattern of a local street gang.
“If it wasn’t a robbery, this kid has a hell of a piece,” Nami said.
Polachek looked the body over, before responding, “Sometimes its hard to see if there’s a gunshot wound on bodies in this state of decay, particularly if there’s no exit wound.”
Then he stopped in a sudden realization, looked the body up and down again, “Strange that there’s no bugs.”
“Bugs?” Malcolm asked. He wasn’t particularly well versed on forensic science.
“Maggots, beetle larvae, flesh flies, blowflies, mosquitoes, the usual things you’d expect. Flies would be able to get into a place like this pretty easy, and the body is the most accessible host. Even just a few hours later, untouched, there’d be bugs.”
Nami ejected the tape and sealed it in an evidence bag. He handed it to a forensics officer.
“Get copies of this tape to robbery and street crime. See if they recognize him,” he said.
But Malcolm didn’t hear this exchange. Their voices faded to the background, then faded out entirely. He heard whispers, half-formed words, many voices talking to him at once, hushed voices that weren’t in the room, but watched it nonetheless, a voice like a shrieking whisper saying, “FIND IT. STOP IT.”
He felt light-headed, suddenly drained of even the strength to stand. He stumbled back, his hand touched the counter, and he got a flash of a few hours ago, of Fadil heaving, weakening, and collapsing. His lungs overflowed with blood and mucus; it poured from his mouth. His heart stopped before he hit the floor, and this was where Malcolm came back around, as if someone had just administered smelling salts and he was instantly alive again.
“So what is that smell?” he asked, interrupting the further discussion.
All the eyes in the room turned to him, wondering how he missed the obvious.
“Everything. Everything in the store has gone bad. Even today’s fresh deliveries. Hell, even the Twinkies went bad, and I didn’t think that was possible,” Polacheck answered.
Malcolm looked at the Twinkie display rack. The Twinkie Ranger said, “KILL IT.”
“Anything else you can tell me yet? Cause of death?” Nami asked.
Malcolm couldn’t bear to hear the answer. His throat felt as if a strong hand was closing around it. He felt feverish and short of breath. He turned on his heels, needing to escape the onslaught of sensations and ran out the front door.
Nami didn’t mind following Malcolm out of the store to calm his friend’s nerves, any excuse for a breath of clean air was good enough for him, but by the time he made it out the door Malcolm was out of sight. The two cops guarding the door pointed in the direction of a small city playlot down the street.
Malcolm knew that Nami was going to follow him, Nami’s human compassion was predictable and reliable, one of his better qualities, even if Malcolm didn’t feel it necessary in his case to be the object of the compassion. Throughout their history of working together, Nami had always looked out for Malcolm, while being completely unaware of how many times Malcolm had returned the favor.
When Nami caught up to him, Malcolm sat on a bench in front of the park, holding his head as if he had a hangover, made worse by the high pitched laughter of the children monkeying about on the slides and swings. The kids seemed blissfully unaware of the catastrophe back in the store. Even the prevailing winds shielded them from the smell of the convenience store, for the most part. I’m strong enough for this, Malcolm thought, I don’t need to be coddled.
Usually the victim of demonic attack was someone with a questionable background, drug addicts because their altered chemistry allows easier feeding; or black magic users who were in over their heads when they did a summoning; deaths that were excusable, maybe even beneficial to the rest of us. This time, Malcolm thought, the victim was a friend, an honest man who had no idea what was just beyond perception. He didn’t seek this out, nor did he deserve it.
But Malcolm pulled himself together as Nami sat down next to him. It wasn’t like he could tell Nami what had really overwhelmed him in the store. He held his breath a moment before saying anything.
“I’m okay,” Malcolm said, drawing out the last syllable like a child emphasizing the point.
This hardly convinced Nami. He resettled himself, unbuttoned his collar to feel a bit more relaxed. He’d never seen Malcolm behave like he did in the store, never seen him lose even a hint of composure, and any number of reasons why floated through his head. He was unsure of how to begin. Malcolm, he knew, was sometimes as obtuse as they come, and sometimes more astute than anyone in the world. Nami knew he always had to use just the right words with Malcolm.
“I know I usually don’t bring you to the scene, but this time you brought yourself. You sure you’re okay?”
Malcolm didn’t have to reflect on this one long. Even though their frequent collaboration on homicides had led Nami to receive ever more unusual cases, Malcolm had seen far more disturbing images than this. He didn’t want to mention this, though. That would have led to a longer conversation of reminiscing that he wasn’t in the mood for. Malcolm deliberated on just what course of conversation will get Nami to leave him alone the quickest.
In the end he tersely said, “I’ll be alright.”
Nami didn’t believe him. He interpreted this as Malcolm’s attempt to convince himself of some strength he didn’t have. He admired the attempt.
“I forget what its like, not seeing this every day. You get used to it,” Nami offered.
In a way, Malcolm wanted to tell Nami everything, wanted to tell him about the demons, the truth about the cases they’d worked in the past, how he conducted his part of the investigations, the clues he found in text of whatever holistic derivation, of evidence and testimony that would be impossible to register in court. No, he couldn’t reveal any of that. That always led to trouble., trouble like what happened in The Convenient Store.
“I’m not so…” he started off, but then thought better of it. He didn’t want Nami to come to harm. He negated himself, and internalized the desire come clean. “Never mind.”
Nami reached into an inside pocket of his overcoat and searched for a moment before producing a bottle of water. It made Malcolm wonder if it was only he and detectives who had to be prepared for anything regardless of the weather.
“Here, have a drink.” Nami said, offering the bottle to Malcolm. Malcolm eyed it warily, as if its contents were suspect.
“It’s not from the store. Scout’s honor,” Nami held up three fingers, making an oath.
Malcolm accepted the bottle, but still examined it before cracking the cap.
“It’s strange how hard it is to keep your eyes off the…victim-especially the first time,” Nami said and, trying to breach the subject with tact and decorum, “Is this your first time? I usually only bring you after the scene has been cleaned up.”
Malcolm looked up at him incredulously, hoping to impart a great deal of information about his history of dealing with sordid endings with the look of his eyes. The gaze left too much to guesswork, or the message he read overloaded Nami too much and so he passed over it, filtered it out, getting only the feeling of being strangely and horrifically unsettled. He decided to stop beating around the bush, he had to ask directly or Malcolm was never going to figure out what he was really trying to ask.
“Of all places you could have gone to, what brought you there?”
“Like I said. Milk. Eggs. I ran out.”
“Sheesh…” Nami groaned. “How is it whenever some poor bastard finds a really messed up way to die, you happen to run out of milk and eggs?”
Malcolm laughed slightly, his eyes lit up, having just hit on a thought that Nami would bet was amusing only to Malcolm.
“It’s a convenient store,” Malcolm said. “I always go there. I’ve known Fadil for years.”
Nami could tell from the tone of Malcolm’s voice that Malcolm was amused, but finished with him. He had a way of saying when the conversation was over without actually saying it that Nami had learned to accept, no matter how abrupt it was. At that point, the conversation was simply over.
“Hey, had to ask, you know?” Nami said, relenting. He put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder reassuringly, smiled, and got to his feet, resigning himself to going back to the smell. The apprehension was obvious even to Malcolm. He lingered a moment longer, taking in deep breaths of air in preparation of going back.
“I understand,” Malcolm conceded, it was Nami’s job to be curious. It was Malcolm’s job to protect Nami from the unseen dangers his investigations might lead him to. After many hard lessons, Malcolm has learned it usually worked out better for all involved that way, excepting perhaps himself.
“Look, I’ve got to get back. I’m sorry if he was your friend. I’ll call if I have anything for you, okay?”
Malcolm didn’t even acknowledge Nami leaving. He knew the call would be coming. He didn’t need any special ability to predict that. As he watched Nami tread his way back, Malcolm knew that starting with a phone call in the morning, tomorrow would not go according to schedule either.
Nami suspected there was a joke coming and that somehow he’d figure it out, and it wouldn’t be all that funny, and he’d regret even having stumbled upon the punchline. The conversation turned over in his head. Malcolm’s jokes almost always involved words, word puzzles, puns. Nami wasn’t good at puns. It was one of the reasons why he wasn’t an English major.
In their history together, Nami never knew how Malcolm did it, but every time he’d been stuck on a case, Malcolm looked at the files, went away and came back with the answer. They left the methodology unspoken. It just came to him, Malcolm said. He wasn’t psychic, he swore up and down, but Nami’s buddies all joked with him about how he doesn’t do any detective work, he just went to his psychic buddy and it was all taken care of. If they only knew what it was like to deal with Malcolm, he thought, the jokes are hardly worth the effort.
When Nami got to the store, he looked up at the sign above the door, which read in faded letters, “The Convenient Store.” Punchline. Stumbled over. Regretted. At least he knew Malcolm was handling things.
Malcolm pulled a notebook from his pocket, and looked up to give a slight smile to Nami as he headed back into the store.
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