The Suicide Disease
Fiction by Mike McHone
The Suicide Disease
Part One: The Blonde
The radiation in his blood played seesaw with his guts. Samir leaned against the doorframe of the bedroom and waited for the nausea to pass.
“Y’okay, Sammy?” Miller called.
Samir rubbed his eyes and choked back the vomit.
“Sammy?”
“I’m fine.” He unstuck himself from the door and proceeded inside the bedroom.
She was young, blonde, beautiful. Dead. She lay on her back atop the covers, dressed in a thin white cotton t-shirt, green socks, and pink shorts. Her blue eyes bulged from their sockets in little bloodshot domes. A purple indention about an inch or so wide was embedded across her throat and, curving upward around both sides of her jaw, disappeared behind each earlobe.
Miller, the CSI, was in the middle of taking samples from underneath her fingernails when Samir asked the time of death.
“Ten, twelve hours ago, it looksit,” Miller said.
Samir stood lost in the domes for a moment before he turned and opened the closet.
Every space on the rack was filled save for a small area near the end. The dresser told a similar story. All the drawers were packed except the one at the bottom. He double-backed to the kitchen and found her driver’s license inside her purse on the table. Brenda Mackey.
She would’ve turned twenty-six in October.
Next to the purse was a cellphone bill and a rent notice from Yaldo Enterprises.
In the bathroom, the usual items were in the medicine chest, toothpaste, aspirin, a bottle of melatonin. In the trash bin he found wads of used tissue, an empty bottle of shampoo, and a pregnancy test.
It was positive.
He brought out an evidence bag from his coat pocket and placed the test inside just as the radiation in his system made waves of the world. The nausea came back for a second bout.
He lost the rematch.
#
He flushed, pulled the rubber gloves off his hands and shoved them into his coat pocket. He rinsed his mouth out and headed back outside. It was the last Saturday morning of July and the humidity had already turned downtown Dearborn into a sauna. Sweat beaded to the surface of Samir’s forehead as soon as he stepped off the porch. The sound of traffic out on nearby Michigan Avenue took a jackhammer to Samir’s skull.
Stella Rios, the woman who discovered Brenda’s body, waited near the front door with a patrolman. She was a petite brunette clad in a pink tank top, leggings, and white Reeboks. Her arms were toned and a tattoo of a compass rose covered the entirety of her right shoulder. To say she was attractive would be like saying Bill Gates had a few bucks in his pocket.
“Ms. Rios?” Samir said. “I’m Sam Reda, detective with Dearborn PD.” He cocked his head toward the backyard. “Let’s talk where it’s quieter.”
He walked to the backyard and she followed. He noticed a small splotch of puke on his right shoe. Goddamn it. He dragged it through the grass until the splotch disappeared, and checked his pantlegs and coat for any other signs and, thankfully, saw none.
Once they were out of earshot of the traffic, Samir asked Rios to walk him through what happened.
She brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “I came over around seven-thirty, went in, and found her,” she said, “on her bed.” Another strand was brushed free. “Then I called you guys.”
He pulled a notepad and pen from his jacket. “Was she expecting you that early?”
She nodded. “Breanda took a yoga class at my gym. I came by to pick her up. We were going to go to class and get some brunch afterward.”
“Was the front door unlocked?”
“No, I used the spare key she gave me. She was out of town this past weekend, asked me to get her mail, check on the house, things like that,” she said. “I was going to give the key back to her today.”
“Is there a spouse or boyfriend?”
“She has a husband but they’ve been separated since May. She started seeing someone else about a month ago.”
“Tell me about the husband.”
“Not a lot to tell. They fought a lot, from what she said. He was always drinking, always out of work.”
“What’s his name?”
“John Mackey.”
He wrote it down. “Do you know where he might be?”
“Brenda said he’s staying with his brother.”
“She was dating someone else, you said?”
“Yeah. Kenny Hassam.”
He stopped and she must’ve seen the look on his face. “You know him?”
He pulled himself out of the crossfire of his thoughts. “I do.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Who doesn’t?”
Exactly. Who fucking doesn’t? “Any parents, close relatives?”
“She never knew her dad and her mom died two or three years ago. She never talked about any sisters or brothers.”
He hated to do it, but… “Did she mention she was pregnant?”
Stella Rios froze in the July heat.
Then came the tears.
#
Samir looked up the number for Yaldo Enterprises on his cell and dialed it. A young man answered, “Yeah?”
“Can I talk to the owner?”
“Ain’t here. He’s at his other business.”
“Which is?”
Yaldo’s Bakery lay a block over from the house. The bell above the door chimed when Samir went inside.
“With you in a second,” someone called from the back. A handmade sign on the wall informed customers in both English and Arabic they were under surveillance. Zaatar bread, baklawa, and spinach pies sat in the glass display case, flanked by cakes on the right and donuts on the left. The scent of sugar was so thick, one sniff could’ve killed a diabetic.
A man of about sixty came from the backroom. He was brown in every sense, hair, eyes, skin, shirt, pants, apron, shoes.
“Rashid Yaldo?” Samir asked.
The brown eyes narrowed. “Yes?”
He showed his badge. “You own the house at 5355 Michigan Avenue?”
“Again with this? I paid the water bill last week. I know it was overdue, but—”
“That’s not why I’m here. Your tenant, Brenda Mackey? She’s been murdered.”
The old man’s mouth looked like an open grave.
#
Yaldo took a seat on the other side of the folding table in the backroom and sipped black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. An industrial fan planted at the other end of the room blew sweet air across them. The backdoor was propped open to a scenic view of an alleyway filled with rolling hills of trash bags. “This is so very sad,” Yaldo said. “Allah yerhama.”
“Yes, may God have mercy,” Samir repeated, not that he believed it. “What can you tell me about Brenda and her husband?”
“Always fighting,” he said. “I live next door, and every day it was noise.”
“When was the last time you heard them argue?”
“Two months ago. I go over, I say, ‘You pay rent here, but this is my home. You stop or I’ll call the police.’ An hour later, Brenda kicked John out. I was happy to see him go.”
“Did you see John last night?”
“No, no. I was in bed by eight-thirty. I get up early, around four, to open the bakery.”
“Was there anyone else at the house?”
“Only once. Another man, some weeks ago. Big man. Dressed well. Suit and rings.”
Kenny.
Samir thanked Yaldo for his time. Both men walked to the front of the shop. The old man turned the Closed sign in the window back around to Open and unlocked the door. “By the way,” he said, “you never told me how she was… you know.”
“She was strangled.”
“Ah,” he said. “Good.”
What the fu— “I’m sorry?”
“I don’t mean ‘good’ in a bad way,” he said. “I was concerned if I had to hire a cleaning crew in case there was blood, you see. With people looking for places to stay, it would take longer to have the place ready to rent, that’s all.”
He was certain the tornado in his stomach wasn’t due to the radiation this time. “I’m glad she could make it easy on you.” Samir opened the door and stepped back into the comfort of an unbearable heat.
#
Kenny wasn’t at the car dealership the receptionist said, so he left a message and made sure to tell Amber, a woman who sounded as if she inhaled a tank of helium before she got on the phone, “Tell him Sam called. It’s urgent.”
“Will do,” she squeaked.
He hung up, called dispatch and asked them to find any addresses attached to John and Josh Mackey. There were two on record, Brenda Mackey’s house, and 1324 Eton Street.
He started over. Less than two blocks away, traffic came to a bottleneck at Michigan Avenue and Woodcroft. A utility crew was in the middle of repairs on a smashed light pole. Three lanes of traffic funneled down to one.
The usual twenty-minute drive across the city took twice as long. It was almost eleven when Samir pulled his Blazer into the Eton house driveway. In the front yard, a yellow Don’t Tread on Me flag and the good ol’ Stars and Bars snapped like whips on a flagpole.
“This ought to be…” He decided on interesting.
Samir got out, went up the front steps, and rang the bell. The door cracked and Josh Mackey’s ruddy face peered above a chain lock. No greeting came from either man. Samir reached for his badge and stopped when he heard a familiar click.
“Put your hands where I can see them,” Josh ordered.
“Funny,” Samir said, “I was going to tell you the same thing.”
“What’s your business?”
“I’m a cop,” he said. “I’m looking for your brother, but first, I need you to open the door and hand over the gun.”
The laugh had no humor in it. “Got a warrant?”
“Give me the gun, Josh.”
“You ain’t getting my gun and you ain’t getting in without a warrant.”
“Josh.”
“I said what I said. Now, get on your fucking camel and don’t come back h—”
Samir drove his foot into the door and the chain lock ripped away from the wall.
Mackey tumbled backward. Samir moved inside, thrust his shoulder into Mackey’s breastbone, and wrenched a .22 from a not-quite-cold and not-yet-dead hand. He moved behind Mackey and pulled the young man’s beefy arm up toward the center of his back. “Where’s your brother?”
“Ain’t telling you shit, sand nig—” The sentence ended in a shout as Samir wrenched the young man’s arm up towards the shoulder blade. Samir put the .22 in his coat pocket and brought out a pair of cuffs. He clamped one on Josh’s wrist, brought the arm back to a resting position, and led the prick outside like a reluctant puppy. Samir attached the other cuff to the guardrail on the porch.
Samir went back inside the house. It could’ve been a contender for the next season of Hoarders. A dozen or so cups from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell mingled together on the coffee table along with sales flyers and coupons from just about every store and restaurant in the Midwest. An ashtray filled with cigarettes and roaches sat on side table next to a shade-less lamp. Clothes and towels were strewn all over the floor, as were plastic bags from Dollar General and empty pizza boxes. “Love what you haven’t done with the place. You going for a post-war Saigon look?”
The Little Interior Decorator that Couldn’t didn’t reply.
Samir moved from the living room to the kitchen. Mounds of dishes occupied the sink and flies buzzed about a trashcan that probably hadn’t been emptied since Obama was in office. He then checked the bathroom and bedrooms and found nothing but mold and mildew.
Back in the living room, Samir picked up a cellphone from the side table and tapped the screen. The wallpaper showed a naked redhead draped over the hood of a classic Mustang. Both chassis were impressive. He scrolled through the texts but didn’t see anything recent to or from John. He went to the contacts page, found John’s number and dialed. It went to voicemail. He sent a text (Cops here where u at?) then tucked the phone into his suitcoat pocket.
Samir walked back outside and unhooked Josh. He brought out the .22, cleared the chamber and undid the clip, and tossed the gun onto the front lawn and the clip into a rosebush beside the porch. “I’m taking your cellphone as evidence, just so you know,” Samir said and walked away.
Josh Mackey called out, “You think I won’t report this?”
“You think I care?”
“Asshole.”
“Have a nice day.”
He got in his Blazer, backed out, headed east, and…
#
A tap.
“Sir?”
Where…?
He opened his eyes.
“Hello?”
He blinked. He was in his vehicle. He knew that much. Another blink. A parking lot. Auto Zone. He turned his head to the left. Blink. A young sheriff’s deputy at his driver’s side window. The deputy mimed rolling down a window.
Samir lowered it.
“You okay?” the deputy asked.
“I’m…” Blink. “I’m all right.”
“You mind stepping out of the vehicle for me?”
“I’m a homicide detective… with Dearborn PD.”
“We’ll talk about that once you get out of the vehicle.”
“Let me get my badge, and—”
“I’m not telling you again.” He noticed the kid’s right hand hovering above his holster. Since getting shot wasn’t on the day’s itinerary, he got out.
“Weapons on you?”
“9 mil, left side.”
The deputy took it along with Samir’s badge, wallet, and keys. “Have a seat in your car. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He sat. He glared at the Auto Zone sign, at the people filing in and out of the store.
How long had he been there? He looked at his watch. It was closing in on noon. He’d been asleep, ten, fifteen minutes. Then he remembered. Driving. Feeling sick. Head swimming. All he wanted, more than anything, was to crawl into bed. Just a few minutes, he’d told himself. A quick nap, then back to it. Right as rain.
Yeah. Right.
Before long, the deputy came back and returned Samir’s items. “Sorry about the confusion, Detective. Folks in the store saw you out here, called it in. Just wanted to be cautious. You good to drive?”
Samir said he was. “Yeah. I get”—he thought—“low blood sugar sometimes. Wipes me out from time to time, but I’m good.”
“All right, then. You have a good day, sir, and be safe.” The kid went back to his vehicle.
Samir shut the door, set his wallet and badge in the passenger seat and started the engine.
He checked Mackey’s cellphone. Nothing. He checked his and saw there was a voicemail. He played it. “Sammy, it’s Kenny. Heard you were looking for me, bro. Hope everything’s cool. I’m back at work. Stop on by if you want. Haven’t seen your ass in a minute. Talk at you later. Peace.”
He hung up, pulled out of the lot and psyched himself up for the conversation that was about to take place.
#
“Sammy!”
Still the same. Still loud. Still fat.
Still Kenny.
Samir crossed the floor of the dealership into the open arms of his friend, and as goddamn always, Khalid “Kenny” Hassam wore too much cologne. If the smell wouldn’t suffocate him the bearhug was bound to. “How are you, brother?” Kenny asked.
“Let me breathe and I’ll tell you,” Samir struggled.
Kenny released him. “Hey, how’s the…” He pointed at Samir’s body.
“What?”
He looked around and lowered his voice. “I heard you were getting, like, chemo or…?”
“Radiation treatment.”
“Ah, right, right. For?”
“Trigeminal neuralgia.”
“Tri—what’s it?”
“A nerve disorder.”
“Oh… So, it’s not, like, you know, cancer or anything?”
“No.”
“Ah. It’s just that, you know, when I heard about the radiation, I thought, like, you might have something serious, you know, like, uh, cancer.”
“Sorry to disappoint you?”
Another laugh. “Smartass. What brings you by? Ready to trade in the Blazer, get yourself an honest-to-God pussy magnet?”
“The Blazer’s running fine, Ken. Look, can we talk in private?”
“Sure, sure. Back here.” They headed toward Kenny’s office at the southside of the building and walked past new Corvettes, Impalas, and the latest Silverado on their way. The smell of new tires and treated leather filled the showroom. They went inside the office. Ken shut the door and the din of ringing telephones and intercom announcements throughout the dealership vanished. The conditioned air was cool and gooseflesh rose on Samir’s forearms.
Kenny lowered his bulk into a leather chair on the other side of the desk. “What’s up?”
Rip the bandage off, Samir told himself. Get it going. Get it done.
“Brenda Mackey’s dead.”
Kenny sat as still as an ancient mountain for a moment before he crumbled. His shoulders and eyes dropped and his chin folded toward his chest. “How?” he asked.
“Strangled,” Samir told the top of his friend’s head. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Sunday,” Kenny said into this chest. “We went to Traverse City for the weekend, came back Sunday night.”
“How long were you dating?”
“Only three weeks, almost four.”
“Where’d you met her?”
He lifted his head. “At the gym. I go to. Downtown Fitness.”
“The one Stella Rios owns?”
He nodded. “Her and her family.”
“Where were you last night?”
“I was here till eleven. You…?” Ken swallowed. “You got any suspects?”
Here we go. “I’m still gathering info.”
“Gathering info. How much more you need to gather?”
“It’s hard to say,” he said, and added, “right now.”
The mountain returned. “Then you’ll tell me when you do?”
Fuck. “I can’t do that.”
“Can’t?”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Ken.”
“You can.”
“Ken.”
“All the contacts I have in the city? I’ll find out one way or another. I’ll find out the moment it fucking happens, but I would greatly, strongly prefer if it came to me from my very good friend.”
A dry tongue ran over an equally dry mouth. “I can’t give you—”
A fist slammed down onto the desk. Samir was soft earth on the receiving end of a steam shovel. He grew angry but not at Kenny. Samir had been acquainted with his friend’s temper since grade school and knew what Kenny was capable of with his own two, or hired, hands. He also knew the guy had an endless list of powerful friends and enough dirt on every person of influence throughout Dearborn, Detroit, the Great Lakes region, that assured him he’d never see the inside of a courtroom unless he got a wild hair up his ass and decided to get a law degree. It helped to have that skillset as a businessman in Michigan. And a loan shark for the Chaldean mafia.
“You heard me,” Kenny said, his voice soft as cotton, as his fist reverted back into a hand. “Find them, and tell me when you do.”
Any further argument would’ve been like trying to grab hold of a cloud. “Okay.”
“Promise me, Samir.”
The detective looked him dead in the eyes. “I promise,” he lied.
Part Two: The Gamma Knife
Samir died three weeks before the start of the Brenda Mackey case.
It was a Saturday, his day off, and he was halfway through an episode of Star Trek and a bottle of OxyContin. A sliver of his brain knew he took too much, but his hand couldn’t help but dip into the bottle and his mouth couldn’t refuse the hand. Around noon, Samir watched himself, as if he were viewing a film shot in first person perspective, leave his house, get into his car and take a drive. Why he left was anyone’s guess, even his. His arms, hands, feet, legs, muscles, bones, were all in control, while his thoughts and his soul were simply stowaways inside his own body.
He ended up at a park on the edge of the city. He got out, saw the lush grass, laid down, and felt at peace with the world and at one with… all things… in the… universe… and…
God…
Damn!
Life shot through the cisterns of his heart and lit up every nerve in his body. His spine catapulted him upright. Two EMTs knelt before him, while a bouquet of six or seven faces just over the shoulders of the EMTs peered at him like the car wreck he felt like. He tried to talk, tried to ask what happened, but couldn’t pull any sounds from his throat.
“Congrats on rejoining the living,” the EMT on the left told him. Samir stared at the container of Narcan clutched in the man’s rubber glove. “You’re lucky they were here.” The glove pointed at a boy of about nine or ten and an old man at the center of the crowd. On the ground at their feet were fishing poles and a tackle box. The other EMT, a pale-as-snow ginger, told him, “Kid and his granddad wanted to go fishing, and ended up seeing some guy OD in the park and had to call 911. Congrats on ruining their day.”
Samir wanted to punch the guy, but couldn’t find the strength. He opted to lie back on the stretcher (he’d realized at that moment he was on a stretcher) and fall back asleep.
He woke up in a hospital later that day. A nurse, a stout dark-haired woman, entered his room and asked how he was, if he was feeling better, and if she could get him anything. He gave one-word answers to her questions. “Fine… Yes… No.”
“How long’ve you been using?”
He didn’t answer.
“You can tell me.”
He didn’t.
“I’m not going to turn you in, I promise. God, knows I’ve had more than my share of ODs. I only want to know what’s going on so we know how to treat you.”
He could tell she wasn’t going to leave until she got answers. She would’ve made a great cop. Or maybe not. She seemed like she had a conscience.
“Couple of months,” he admitted.
She checked the monitors above his bed. “Heroin?”
“Oxy.”
“Mmm. Anything before that? Weed?”
“No.”
“Then why’d you start?”
He told her, “Pain. Like icepicks. Here.” He pointed at his jaw. “Feels like it’s on fire when the pain comes. And when it comes… I… I can’t take it.”
The first time he felt it was five months prior, he said. He simply woke up one morning, went to the bathroom, squeezed out some toothpaste onto his toothbrush, stuck it into the left side of his mouth and blinding hot pain went off in his skull like a bomb. It sent him to his knees where he curled his body into a question mark and screamed to Christ and back.
After a minute, maybe less (maybe an eternity, he couldn’t fucking tell), the pain vanished. Woosh. Gone. No trace. No throbbing. No after-effects. Nothing lingering. Nothing at all. Like it was never there.
Samir unfurled himself, slowly picked himself off the linoleum, and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He opened his mouth, peered inside, expecting to find a broken tooth, an abscess, or something, but saw nothing unusual, and that is exactly what the dentist found at the emergency appointment later that day. “Sorry,” the dentist told him. “I’m not seeing anything.”
Samir paid the goddamn copay and left.
The following morning, he opted for mouthwash instead of the toothbrush. He swished and spit. Nothing happened. He did it a second time. Nothing happened. He checked his mouth. Nothing. He stepped into the shower and when the water hit the left side of his face it was like he’d been slapped with a plank of hot steel. He jumped out of the shower, nearly slipped on the floor, and then, again, the pain vanished. Samir lifted a hand to touch his jaw, but the hand pulled itself away as if it had better sense the man attached to it.
Samir toweled off and made another dentist’s appointment. Again, nothing was found, nor was there anything discovered at the orthodontist’s appointment the day after. The orthodontist told him, “I think this is all in your head.”
“You think?” Samir asked, the sarcasm in his voice hotly drizzled over each word. “That’s exactly the problem! It is in my goddamn head, you useless sack of shit!”
He was asked to leave and never come back to that particular office.
From there, he started to bathe only with a washcloth, slept on his right side, and didn’t risk a smile. The pain was held at bay for about a week, then out of nowhere, while he sat on his couch and watched TV, it came at him again. The flare lasted only a few seconds, but that time, once it passed, a continuous pulse was left behind. It felt like a jagged fingernail poking into his jaw over and over, relentless, persistent, maddening. Aspirin was useless, topical anesthetic was pointless.
Then came the day where he called Leah Crampton.
Leah wasn’t quite an ex-girlfriend. They’d met online over a year prior, dated a few times, then agreed that their jobs and schedules meant they’d never have a chance to get into a serious relationship and parted amicably. She was an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and pulled many shifts at the local hospital. She was just leaving one of those shifts when Samir’s call came through. When she answered, her “Hello?” held a mixture of surprise and concern. Samir didn’t waste time. He gave her the rundown of the previous couple weeks and asked if there was anything she could give him. She told him the best she could do was Tylenol 4s. He filled the script, took one in the parking lot of Walgreens, and felt the effects on his way home. He took two more before he went to bed that night.
After three days, the pills were gone. He called Leah for a refill, to which she asked in no uncertain terms, “Are you fucking kidding?” He was not. She said she’d give him one more refill, but that was it. She wouldn’t help him with anything else and it was best he got rid of her number.
“And that’s when you started with Oxy?” the nurse asked.
He said yes, but didn’t elaborate as to how, and thankfully, the nurse didn’t ask.
With the Tylenol 4 refill tapped, he paid a visit to Chuck Cooley, a known drug dealer and confidential informant for Dearborn PD. Most of Cooley’s info was geared toward drug activity, but as anyone with a shred of familiarity with police work knows, drug activity often crosses paths with gang activity which double-crosses paths with Samir’s wheelhouse: homicide.
The Fairlane Meadows apartment complex sat in the shadow of the Ford Motor Company headquarters. He went to door 7A and knocked. Cooley answered with a spoon in one hand and a bowl of cereal in the other. Samir looked for burn marks on the underside of the spoon but found none.
“Hey, Sam,” Cooley said through a mouthful of Lucky Charms.
“I need your help.”
The young guy shrugged. “Ain’t got nothing new for ya. Done told Lawson all I know ‘bout that pharmacist on the eastside. Don’t know shit else.”
Samir knew Jerry Lawson, the head detective of narcotics, but didn’t know anything about the pharmacist Cooley blathered about and didn’t care. He also didn’t care to be seen standing there outside the shitbag’s apartment for too long. He decided to take off the kid gloves and go direct. “I want pills, and I want this to stay between us, you understand?”
Cooley’s eyes walked over him for a moment before he cocked his white boy dreads towards the apartment interior. “C’mon.”
Samir left the apartment that day with his wallet three-hundred bucks lighter and his jacket pocket bulging with an unmarked bottle. Life was bearable again, but before he knew it, five months passed by and culminated in a death, a resurrection, and a hospital stay.
The following morning, a doctor by the name of Cromwell, a guy who looked like he could model polos for Abercrombie and Fitch, gave the official diagnosis. Trigeminal neuralgia. “It used to be called the Suicide Disease,” Cromwell said. “People couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so they’d go crazy, blow their brains out, throw themselves off a bridge.”
Samir almost complimented the guy on his bedside manner.
“There’s a blood vessel pressing down on the trigeminal nerve in your skull,” the doctor said. “That’s what’s causing the flare ups. Good news is, it’s a somewhat easy fix. There’re two types of surgeries available, invasive and non-invasive. I recommend the later.”
“What’s involved in the non-invasive?”
“Radiation,” Cromwell said. “We have a machine called a Gamma Knife. It focuses radiation on a specific area of the body, zaps the nerve. It’s out-patient, so you’re in and out of here in about two hours.”
“Any side effects?”
“You could get the procedure and not feel a thing,” the doctor said, “or you could feel nauseous or fatigued for a few days. It’s hard to predict people’s reaction. Regardless of the short-term effects, the pain will be gone.”
It was a no-brainer. “Sign me up.”
“We have an opening the last Friday in July. I’ll set it up and prescribe some Dilantin and Lioresal. It’ll numb the pain and take the edge off what’s coming next. A little bit anyway.”
“What’s coming next?”
“Detox,” the doctor said.
Samir was discharged that afternoon. He filled his prescription at the hospital pharmacy, Ubered back to the park, got his car, and drove home. Doc Abercrombie was right. The meds eased the detox symptoms but not fully. An hour after he got home the temperature in his house felt somewhere between Arizona in summertime and the ninth circle of Hell. He took a Dilantin, laid down on the couch and watched the room spin. Anything he ate was thrown up within minutes. He stripped naked and laid on the couch and proceeded to sweat into the cushion to the point where it felt as if he were laying on a giant wet sponge.
It took two days for the opioids to leave his system and another two to feel somewhat normal.
When he went in for the procedure, a group of oncologists and nurses placed a four-pronged crowned bracket with shoulder pads onto his head and neck. He was then placed in a wheelchair, taken to a waiting room with a TV and told to sit as still as he could. For the better part of an hour, he sat like a piss-poor parody of Frankenstein’s monster and watched The Price is Right. After a lady from Missouri won the Showcase Showdown, they wheeled him down the hall to a room with a huge device that looked like an MRI machine. He laid down on a table which was slid into the hull of the machine, and soon green and white lights flashed across his face. An hour later, the doctors told him the procedure was complete, and the pain in his head was cut free by the edge of a knife he couldn’t see. The doctors asked him how he felt.
“I…” He didn’t know what to say.
Part Three: See All the People
Before Samir pulled away from Kenny’s dealership, the cellphone vibrated.
Mackey’s cellphone.
A text.
At Falcon Inn. Layin low. Telll me when cops r gone.
Sam hit the gas and headed east.
#
The motel manager said Mackey was in room 2B. Before he started over, Samir asked if he could borrow one of the cleaning carts with fresh linens and such. The manager, an old woman with a shock of white hair and blueish cataracts, looked confused but agreed.
2B.
Or not to be, Samir thought before he knocked. He moved himself to the side in case any bullets were on their way to answer the door. He heard faint footfalls come from inside the room. “Who is it?” a muffled voice called.
“Housekeeping,” Samir said. “Here to change the sheets.”
“Don’t need it.”
“Well”—think—“do you need the”—think—“garbage emptied? I can do that for you while I’m here.”
No reply.
Damn it, he really didn’t want to kick in another door.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, yeah. Hold on.”
He heard the click of the deadbolt. The door opened.
Samir squared himself with the entrance and pulled his sidearm. John Mackey’s eyes doubled in size. Samir took notice of the cuts on the young man’s face and the marble-sized welt on his forehead. “Hands,” Samir ordered. Mackey reached for the mirrors on the ceiling. “Turn around.”
“I swear, I didn’t do anything,” Mackey said.
Samir brought out the cuffs. “You can swear when the court clerk gives you a bible.”
“I want a lawyer,” Mackey said.
“I’d want one too if I killed my wife,” Samir said.
#
“Sam?”
His soul let out a sigh.
He took his hands off his keyboard and swiveled his chair toward the voice.
Captain May Carlin stood just inside his cubicle in her obligatory black pantsuit and hoop earrings that were so big they could’ve been used for a game of pickup basketball. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Getting a jump on my report.”
“Your suspect’s lawyer came in a couple minutes ago. They’re in IR1.”
IR1 being interrogation room one. “Thanks,” he said.
She crossed her arms and cocked her head. He knew what was about to happen and wished to hell she’d hurry up and get on with it. “A resident by the name of Josh Mackey called here a little while ago,” she told him, “said he was going to file a harassment claim.”
“Hmm.”
“He said plain clothes cop roughed him up, took his phone, searched his residence without permission?”
“I also took away the gun he had pointed at me. He mention that?”
“You went into his house?”
“I was looking for his brother. I had cause.”
“Why didn’t you call for backup before going over?”
“Brenda Mackey had been dead at least ten hours. I didn’t want to waste any time.”
“Taking the phone?”
“What do you want me to say? There was a chance John, the murder suspect, would’ve reached out to his brother and told him his location, which he did. If that… If that prick… wants to file a…”—dizziness came over him—“harassment claim, let him. I don’t…”
“You all right?”
He gripped the armrests of his chair. “Blood sugar’s a little low, I think.”
“Maybe you should eat something.”
The thought of food… His stomach turned like a pinwheel in a hurricane. “I’ll stop at the vending machine.”
“Sam, you’re fresh off medical,” she said. “You said it wasn’t anything serious, but I have to be honest, you didn’t look good when you walked in here this morning. I’m begging you, for the rest of the day, hell, the rest of the week, take it easy, would you?”
He looked up at her and forced a smile. “I will.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” He was getting good at lying.
#
Samir entered the interrogation room and came face to face with David Snavely, ambulance chaser extraordinaire. He had an ego about as big as the billboard on I-75 that bore his face, and all the charm of a rabid chihuahua. “What are the charges against my client, detective?” Snavely asked.
Samir closed the door and sat down. “He’s not charged with anything yet, Mr. Snavely, that’s why I asked him to come on down here and have a chat.”
“You didn’t ‘ask’ him, Detective Reda. He said he was placed in a police cruiser like a common criminal.”
“That’s the problem with criminals, Mr. Snavely. They’re so common.”
The lawyer’s features reddened and sweat dotted his forehead. He looked like a spritzed radish. “He’s sat here for well over two hours and you still have not told him why he’s being detained.”
“I’m getting to that right now,” Samir told the radish, then asked the common criminal, “Why’d you kill your wife, John?”
“Don’t answer that,” Snavely told his client.
“Is it because she was seeing another guy?”
“Don’t answer that either,” Snavely said.
“Or because she was pregnant?”
“What?” John asked.
“Pregnant,” Samir repeated. “You know, it happens sometimes after people have sex?”
“Enough,” Snavely said and shot out of his chair. “We’re leaving, John. Let’s go. Now.”
“You can go if you want,” Samir told the suspect. “I’ll get a warrant, arrest you, tack on charges of obstruction, note in my report you were uncooperative. Up to you.”
“I didn’t kill her,” John said.
“Then who did?”
“Detective, for Pete’s sake,” Snavely pleaded.
“If you didn’t kill her, then you’d better fucking tell me who did, because as far as I—”
“She killed herself!”
Snavely resembled a marionette in the hands of a statue. After a moment of loud silence, he sat down.
“Talk to me, John,” Samir urged. “I need to know what happened.”
John pressed his knuckles into his eyes. “We fought all the time. About money, bills, my drinking. She kicked me out, and at first I was ready to move on, put everything behind me, but the more I thought about it, I realized… she was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He cracked his knuckles. “I wanted to fix things between us. She said she’d consider it, or at least talk it over with me,” he said, “if I stayed sober. And I tried to stop. I did, I really tried, but I couldn’t help it. You get this feeling, you know, like you’re drawn to it, like it has you in a grip,” he said, “and you can’t do anything about it.”
Samir ignored the warmth under his collar. “What happened last night?”
John fidgeted. “I was at the hotel watching TV. I moved out of my brother’s place the day before yesterday. He bitched about how high the electric bill had gotten since I moved in. We yelled back and forth, threw down, so I left and went to the Falcon. Last night, I got a text from Brenda, asking me to come over. But I didn’t see it till real early this morning, like around six. I was up all last night…”
“Drinking?”
He nodded. “I went to the house around seven, knocked, didn’t get an answer. I used the hide-a-key for the back door, went in, called her name, still didn’t get an answer. I checked the living room, the bedroom. I couldn’t find her.” He swallowed. “Then I went into the basement… and she was hanging there.” Tears rose. “Hanging by her neck.”
Samir asked. “How’d she end up in the bedroom?”
“I cut her down with my pocketknife and carried her upstairs.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I… I didn’t want to see her like that. No one should’ve seen her like that. No one. Not like that.” It became a mantra. “Not like that.”
“Why didn’t you call 911?”
Another swallow. A fresh tear. “I forgot my phone at the motel.”
“Why not use Brenda’s?”
“I looked around, and I couldn’t find it. So, I-I got scared. I started knocking on the neighbor’s door, Mr. Yaldo’s door, to see if I could use his phone, but he didn’t answer. So, I-I-I panicked. I got in my truck and was-was speeding, going down to the, uh, gas station to the use the phone, but I-I went too fast, lost control of my truck, and I hit this lamppost down near Woodcroft.”
Samir thought of the traffic jam that morning.
“Next thing I know,” John said, “I’m waking up at the hotel, my head’s killing me, I feel sick. I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t know if I walked, or…”
“Did you talk to anyone at the motel? Tell anyone what you saw?”
“I-I-I can’t remember if I did or not.”
Samir and Snavely locked eyes then looked away from each other. “Is there anything to back up what you saw at the house, John?” Samir asked. “Because if what you’re telling me is true, then you need to—”
“The rope,” John said. “The rope she used. I-I-I cut it and tossed it somewhere in the basement. At least a piece of it. The other, you know, other end’s got to still be there on the support beam. I’m sure it’s still there. It has to be there. Right?”
Samir looked at the man’s hands and as he watched the way the fingers interlocked, he thought of the old nursery rhyme he learned as a kid.
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple / Open the doors and see all the people.
He hadn’t thought about it in years.
There was no need to.
#
The number on the caller ID seemed familiar but he couldn’t place it. He pressed his phone to his ear. “Reda.”
“Detective, this is Gene Lutz with the County Coroner Office.” Hence the familiarity. “I have info on the Mackey case if you have a moment.”
He’d walked down the stairs to the basement of Brenda’s house. “I do.” He turned on the light.
“Then I’ll get right to it,” Lutz told him. “The ligature caused injury to the throat, obviously, however there’s far more damage to the neck than what we saw at first glance.”
A five or six-inch piece of black rope dangled from the metal support beam a few feet from the bottom of the stairs. It was hidden behind an air duct, hence why no one saw it.
“There’s pinpoint internal hemorrhaging, which is to be expected, of course.”
The end of the rope was frayed. It was held in place with a large knot about the size of man’s fist. It looked like something you’d see on boat docks.
“There’s also breakage outside the parameters of the ligature.”
Samir looked for the other half of the rope.
“Pressure marks were located on the front and back of her neck, beneath the chin and the base of the skull.”
He found it on the floor near the dryer. He picked it up.
“This is to say, Detective, these marks suggest she was strangled by hand initially.”
He felt the smooth texture of the rope between his finger and thumb. “And the rope was placed around her neck after she died?” Samir asked.
“It would appear so.”
Samir looked back at the knot fixed to the support beam.
“Also, Detective,” Lutz said, “there’s one more thing you should know.”
Part Four: You Can’t Win (If You Don’t Play)
Monday morning.
“We offer annual rates,” he said, “but if you sign up for two years right here, today, you get the second year half off.”
“I’d hoped to try the place out before jumping into a contract.”
“Sure, absolutely. We have day passes available for fifteen dollars. You get access to all gym equipment, showers, sauna, tanning bed.”
A redhead with more curves than a circle sauntered by. “Hi, Jack,” she said.
“Hi,” Jack replied. He leaned close to the visitor once she was out of earshot. “Can’t remember her name, but I’ll never forget that ass.”
The visitor noticed the man’s wedding band.
“You ready to do this, my man?” Jack asked.
“Definitely,” the visitor said.
#
Once the yoga class ended and the next-to-the-last person filed out, Samir entered the room. Stella Rios had finished rolling up her mat when she saw him. “Detective?” Her eyes went from the Detroit Lions ballcap on his head down to his black Nikes. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to check the place out,” he said, “maybe get a membership. I had a procedure done recently. My doctor said getting some exercise would be good for me.”
“That’s good to hear,” she said.
“I also wanted to let you know I located John Mackey.”
She tucked the mat under her arm.
“It turns out he strangled Brenda, strung her up by her neck, tried to make it look like a suicide.”
“Oh my God.”
“He did say at first he found her hanging by her neck, that he cut her down and moved her for some odd reason.”
“Moved her?”
“Yes, but eventually he copped to all of it. He said he was drinking, obsessing about their marriage, how Brenda ended things. He snapped, went to the house, choked her, staged the suicide. Then he thought a suicide would look too suspicious. Why would she kill herself when she never showed any signs of depression? It didn’t make any sense. So, he took her upstairs and hoped the cops would think it was an intruder. I know it’s tough to hear, Ms. Rios, but at least we can put it to rest now.”
“We can,” she said, “Thank you for letting me know, Detective. That’s very kind of—”
“The knots though…”
She gave a confused look. “What’s that?”
“The knots on the rope,” Samir said. “Sorry, I was thinking aloud. I keep going over the knots he used. You see, the end of the rope around the beam in the basement was tied with a double half hitch knot, and the end around Brenda’s neck was a bowline knot,” he told her. “Most people don’t even know what those are let alone how to tie them. I mean, I had to look them up just to find out the names. The weird thing is, I’ve investigated three hangings in my career, and all of them used overhand knots, you know, the kind of knot everybody knows how to tie. But the bowline and double half hitch?” He clucked his tongue. “John wasn’t in the Boy Scouts, isn’t a fisherman, so where would he learn to do something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the rope. That’s a peculiar thing too, because why of all things,” he asked, “would he use a jump rope?”
Her eyes were trained on him.
“Odd, right? Maybe Brenda had one lying around the house, since she was here at the gym so much? Maybe John found it, cut the handles off either end? I mean, he had to do something to cover his tracks. Because he was desperate. Because it’s not like he planned to kill her. It was done without any thought, any consideration to the outcome. Right?”
No response.
Samir pointed at the tattoo on her shoulder. “Compass rose. Brings good luck to sailors, doesn’t it? Did you get that while you were stationed on the USS Nimitz or was it sometime after you got discharged from the Navy? Military docs don’t mention those kinds of things when you run a background check on someone, but I’m sure you already know that don’t you, Petty Officer Rios?”
She attempted to pull away. Samir clutched her arm and told her, “You can walk out quietly, or I’ll drag you out screaming, I don’t care which.”
She left quietly.
#
Samir cradled a banker’s box in the crux of his arm when he entered the interrogation room for the second time that day. He closed the door with his elbow, brought a bottle of water from out of the box, and set it in front of Stella. She grabbed it, uncapped it, and drank without looking up at him. Samir took a seat across from her and sat the box on the floor.
“I know you said you were going to wait for your lawyer, but I figured I’ll get a head start and show you some of the things that are going to put you in prison for the next thirty years or so. Sound good?”
He reached into the box and pulled out a stack of papers. “This is the GPS data from your car. It shows you were at Brenda’s house Friday night.” He set the stack in front of her. Lines of ones, zeros, coordinates and the like took up most of the first page. On the bottom was a photo of Brenda’s house.
Next, he brought out a plastic evidence bag from the box.
“This was found on the jump rope. See? A strand of black hair. Take a wild, wild guess who it belongs to.”
Out came a VHS tape.
“This is surveillance footage from Yaldo’s Bakery. It shows your vehicle heading toward the direction of Brenda’s house at the time of her death. We can give it a watch when your lawyer gets here. I don’t have any popcorn, though. Sorry.”
Another evidence bag.
“And here’s Brenda Mackey’s pregnancy test. See? See the two lines? Positive, like I said, but you know what the crazy thing is, Stella? It’s a false positive. The coroner examined her. She wasn’t pregnant,” he said. “Brenda Mackey was killed for nothing.”
She set the water down and her face fell into her hands.
“He choked the life out of her, Stella. He killed her, killed your friend. And for what? Because a ten-dollar piece of plastic fucked up.”
Her body became an earthquake of sobs. “He didn’t mean it,” she said.
“I know he didn’t. Heat of the moment. Rage. Sad to say, but these things happen all the time… But why help him? Why do such a thing?”
Softly, she said, “He’s my brother.”
And that was all he needed to hear. He almost smiled. “I get it,” he said. “Devotion. Family bonds, and all that. It must be nice to love someone so much you’re willing to go to prison for them.”
She looked away.
“But there’s one other thing that bothers me, Stella. Why didn’t you take the rope out of the basement? If you went inside, saw she’d been moved, why didn’t you… hide the…?”
Tumblers lined up in the lock of his mind. “You didn’t go inside. That’s it, isn’t it? You pulled up, unlocked the door, but you never went in, because—what?—you didn’t want to see her again? It would remind you of what you did? You thought she was still in the basement when you called 911. All this time, you thought I was investigating a suicide, not a murder.” This time, he couldn’t help the smile. “Jesus Christ, you didn’t even know.”
A scream of anger filled the room. It had no effect on the man who heard it.
Samir gathered up the papers and the evidence bag with the strand of hair and threw them in a waste basket in the corner. He saw the look on Stella’s face. “Oh those? The GPS printouts? Just random JavaScript and picture of Brenda’s place I pulled from Google. And the hair in the bag was from me. But now we can compare this,” he said as he picked up the water bottle, “to the actual DNA we found on the rope.” He put the cap back on the bottle and lifted the VHS tape off the table. “I’m not even sure what’s on this. I dug it out of an old box at home. Might be an episode of Baywatch I taped back in the 90s.”
Fury blazed in her eyes. “You made it up?”
“Shitty being lied to, isn’t it?”
Her chest heaved. “And the pregnancy?”
“That was true,” he told her. “The coroner found no trace of her being pregnant. Like I said, your brother killed your friend for no reason whatsoever.”
Her head resembled the top of a pressure cooker.
He put the water bottle, the tape, and test back into the box. “Sit tight, Ms. Rios. We’ll get you fitted for an orange jumpsuit as soon as we can.”
He went into a room across the hall where May Carlin stood at a monitor that showed interrogation room one in glorious black and white.
“Anything good on the tube?” Samir asked.
“A true crime show.”
“God, those things are so fucking boring.” Samir set the box on a folding table near the monitor.
May asked him, “How’d you know her brother did it?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I baited her. I figured she knew who it was, just had to coax it out of her.”
“You told me this morning when you got your warrant you were convinced she rigged the rope, so why didn’t you think she killed Brenda?”
“Brenda had a good eight, nine inches of height on her. The coroner mentioned pressure marks on the back of Brenda’s neck. Stella’s hands are too small to reach that far. Besides, strangulations are almost always committed by men, so I assumed it was a guy. Apologies for the sexism.”
She crossed her arms. “Kind of a gamble wasn’t it?”
“You can’t win if you don’t play.”
Samir grabbed a water bottle from the minifridge near the door and went to interrogation room two to speak to the brother.
#
Jack Rios confessed to the murder of Brenda Mackey and ran Samir through the days that led up to the woman’s death.
A month prior, not long after Brenda separated from her husband, she and Jack made plans to go out on a date, which turned out to be nothing more than a quick dinner, drinks, and a few minutes of sex at a cheap motel. Afterward, when Jack went to put on his pants, his wedding ring fell out of his pocket. Brenda saw it, screamed at Jack for not telling her he was married, and demanded to be taken home.
She stopped attending his cardio class at the gym and avoided speaking to him all together, so he thought it was odd she called him Friday afternoon. After exchanging hellos, Brenda told Jack she was a week late for her period and as a precaution took a pregnancy test. When she told him the result, Jack saw the implosion of his future and knew he’d lose everything. He said he wanted to speak to her face to face, drove to her house, and pleaded with her to terminate the pregnancy. Brenda said she couldn’t bring herself to do such a thing. Before he knew it, Jack’s hands were around her throat.
It took fifteen minutes for Brenda to die.
Afterward, he got scared and called his sister for help. Stella arrived and saw what happened. She went to her car, retrieved a jump rope from her trunk, cut off the handles with a multiuse tool she kept in her glovebox, and they carried Brenda’s body to the basement. As Jack held her, Stella tied one end of the rope to the support beam and the other to her friend’s neck.
Before they left the house, Stella found Brenda’s phone and saw Brenda had texted John earlier and asked him to come over. Wanting to cover their tracks as much as possible, Stella took the phone and, while Jack drove back to his house, Stella tossed Brenda’s phone into the Detroit River and went home. She expected to see Brenda’s house shrouded in police tape when she arrived Saturday morning, figuring John Mackey would’ve reported Brenda’s death. When it looked like John hadn’t shown up, she unlocked the door, stayed outside, and called 911. When the operator asked what happened, Stella said, putting on her best frantic voice, “I don’t know, please hurry,” and hung up and waited.
Jack Rios was charged with second-degree murder, obstruction, and evidence tampering. Stella was charged with obstruction, evidence tampering, and aiding and abetting.
#
Samir made it home around ten that night. He parked in his driveway and started toward his front door.
“Sam.”
He swallowed all the air in Michigan. He turned. Ken came out of the darkness into the glow of a nearby streetlamp. “Must be slipping, letting me sneak up on you like this.” Ken ascended the steps. “You forget something?”
Samir steadied his breath. “I couldn’t hand him over to you.”
“You promised me.”
“I don’t take orders from you, Ken, whether you like it or—”
Ken replied with a fist to Samir’s mouth.
Samir tasted blood. He shook it off, planted his feet, and threw a right hook. And hit nothing. Ken ducked and landed left on Samir’s face. Samir’s eyes filled with water. He felt (and heard) something crack and almost toppled off the side of the porch but caught himself on the railing.
Ken ripped the Beretta from Samir’s holster and took a step back.
Samir spit a jet of hot blood into the bush.
“Always jawing at people,” Ken said. “Been your problem ever since school. You’d talk smack to the jocks, they’d stuff your ass in a locker. Just can’t help yourself, can you?”
He felt around the inside of his mouth with his tongue.
“Maybe that’s why you became a cop. To be a big man, get back at the bad guys.”
One of his back teeth were loose.
“The only way you could become a big man, right? Didn’t want do it with me. Never wanted to work with me or my family.”
He reached into his mouth, pinched the tooth and yanked it free.
“Offered you time and again. ‘Come on, Sammy. Run numbers, that’s all. No nasty work.’”
He didn’t scream, didn’t grunt, groan, or cry. Not then. Not in front of Ken.
“But no. Little Sammy always did things by the book, followed the rules. Well, up until recently, from what I’ve heard.”
He looked at the tooth cradled in his palm in a small pool of blood. It looked like an island surrounded by a sea of black.
“I got eyes all over. Even in hospitals,” he said. “Hopefully, you’ll stay off the pills from now on.”
He spat more blood.
“Jack Rios is going to pay for what he did to Brenda. So’s his sister.”
“I’ll get them out of gen pop.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll still get to them no matter where they go, and all you’ll do is piss me off.”
Samir didn’t reply. He only bled.
“They deserve to die. You know this. Eye for an eye, and a… Well.” He gestured at the thing in Samir’s palm, smirked, then handed him the gun.
“How do you know I won’t shoot you in the back?” he asked through the blood.
Ken smirked. “Please.” He turned. “See you around, Sam. And get to a dentist. Your mouth looks like shit.” He walked back into the shadows. Samir heard a car door slam from somewhere down the block but didn’t bother to look where it came from.
He went inside and set his tooth on the kitchen counter. He turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on his face. He cupped his hands, slurped water from his palms, and dribbled a cascade of blood and water into the drain.
He grabbed the bottles of Dilantin and Lioresal from out of the cupboard along with a glass. He popped one pill from each bottle and filled the glass with water and drank.
Minutes later, he took another Dilantin and another Lioresal.
He carried himself to the living room, laid down on the couch, and with his eyes filled with his body as light as ether, Samir stared up at the ceiling through all the darkness and did something he hadn’t done in months.
He smiled.
And kept smiling until the morning found him.
Mike McHone is a Derringer Award-winning writer whose fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Rock and a Hard Place, Dark Yonder, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, the Anthony Award-nominated anthology Under the Thumb, and elsewhere.
A former journalist, his articles and op-eds have appeared in the Detroit News, the AV Club, Playboy, and numerous other outlets.
He is the recipient of the Mystery Writers of America’s Hugh Holton Award, placed twice on Ellery Queen’s Annual Readers List, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as a Best of the Net Award, and was cited on the Distinguished List in 2024’s Best American Mystery and Suspense. He currently lives in Detroit.
This is a dandy police procedural hitting on all cylinders. Very good character work with Sami the detective and his problems. I like how this dips in Middle-eastern crime gangs in Michigan as part of the setting. Masterful puzzle solving by Sami.
I thought I was too busy to read this rn but couldn't stop!