Before I Pray: A Kevin Killgallen Mystery

BEFORE I PRAY

A Kevin Killgallen Mystery by

Robert McDowell

Smashwords edition

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Cover art: Miss Mae

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO10

CHAPTER THREE19

CHAPTER FOUR37

CHAPTER FIVE51

CHAPTER SIX58

CHAPTER SEVEN69

CHAPTER EIGHT78

CHAPTER NINE88

CHAPTER TEN99

CHAPTER ELEVEN107

CHAPTER TWELVE124

CHAPTER THIRTEEN143

CHAPTER FOURTEEN148

CHAPTER FIFTEEN161

CHAPTER SIXTEEN171

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN181

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN191

CHAPTER NINETEEN204

CHAPTER TWENTY211

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE227

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO237

Chapter One

Hundreds of monarch butterflies finished their death ballet against my windshield as I made my way up Mount Ashland to the Tashi Choling temple. I tried to miss them, pumping the brakes and driving evasively through hairpin turns as I followed the teachings, whispering Om mani padme hum for every splat. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, or if I was doing it right, but someone had told me it helped them as they prepared to enter the next life. I said it over and over, irritated by a sky so blue it hurt my eyes, and a trail of dust in my rearview mirror that looked like a jet’s arrogant signature. It looked a lot like excess, like the price of gas and the slaughter I was making. It looked a lot like my life.

Why don’t they see me coming, I muttered through my sore, clenched jaw as I failed once again to swerve around a roadside explosion of wings and bright orange. They made me think of our boys in Iraq, under-equipped and scared shitless. I thought of the frat boy in the White House and his cronies getting rich while they lied to the country about everything, daring us to do something about it. I never thought I’d live to see an American president that made Warren G. Harding or Calvin Coolidge look good. I never thought I’d see a president who made Tricky Dick almost sympathetic, but I’d made it. I was there. I’d lived a long time.

I punched myself inside for thinking that way. It didn’t click with Tibetan Buddhism. I thought of my morning prostrations, which I performed while imagining the president and his people doing them beside me, with me. Humbling ourselves together helped me, and it was supposed to help them, though the news every day made that hard to figure. Still, the practice helped. It was hard work, and sometimes I believed I was making progress. That’s why I’d chosen this path, committing to the four-year Marig Munsel class that would provide me with a solid foundation for the spiritual life I desired. I wanted to heal, be better than I’d been, so all I could do was train my mind, get ready, and try to unlearn every thing I’d been so sure of. For a couple of minutes a day I thought I was getting there, but memories and random thoughts just wouldn’t be still. It’s lousy having a life you have to answer for. Or, as the practice says, it’s an opportunity.

At the top of the hill I found a panoramic parking space and sat there shaking and sweating, thinking about illusion. What was real? What wasn’t? Ever since I’d signed on for this class I’d lived in fear of the moment when the Lama would kick my prevaricating ass all over the temple space. If you think that Buddhism is touchy-feely love stuff, then you’re the type who buys the cliché that the Sixties was all about hippies. It hadn’t taken me long to discover that the path is more arduous than two-a-day football practices during Hell Week. But that’s ok. I’ve always traveled a tough road.

As I was making up my mind to commit, I had to come up with an answer to the question, what about it attracted me to this path? That Buddhism believes all of life is suffering—samsara—appealed to me. It was one tenet that connected with my personal experience. That one could be different also attracted me. I liked the thought that by learning to be mindful and skillful one could benefit others by alleviating suffering. Who wouldn’t like that? The challenge was in doing it.

In class that day the lama talked about attachment. I won’t pretend I got it all, but he seemed to be saying attachment is an obstacle that one on the path must give up. Oh, is that all? Then I’ll be saved? I thought of my old life. It looked a lot like a blueprint of attachment. Defaced with coffee, food stains and cigarette burns, it was brittle and curling at the edges, but I could still make out words like justice and retribution, right and wrong, and the name of a woman I’d loved and lost.

By the end of the day I felt as I always did after class, fragile and incapable, a wobbly figure standing right outside the Hopeless Room. Back in my car I lost myself in the view until everyone else had gone, then I started back down the mountain through the butterfly gauntlet. When I couldn’t take the destruction I was causing any longer, I drifted back in time over familiar terrain and there I was, trapped in a story I hated though it was my own. Don’t fight random thoughts, the teachings say. Allow them to be what they are. Sit with them. Make room for them. Make friends with them. When they no longer threaten you, they’ll go their way. Illusion passes. So I tried that. I stayed with the thoughts, which swept me back five years to the day I died but didn’t, and they played like this.

*

July 14th, Bastille Day, 2002. Santa Monica, California. Marci and I made soft, slow love in the warm afternoon, unaware of the fact that we would never wake to another day together. We dressed for a dinner dance, and I left early so I could swing by the warehouse and pay off the collector. Marci was supposed to meet me in an hour. We kissed, and the phone rang. I stopped at the door to look back at her listening intently, concentrating. She was too beautiful when she did that.

I parked in front of the warehouse and got out of the car feeling proud, satisfied and elated, and walked straight into Hell.

It’s rare that an end game pay-off goes bad, yet it happens. I had no reason to think that one would, but then I wasn’t thinking. I was daydreaming about the things that Marci and I had done all afternoon, the endearments we’d whispered, the plans we’d made. I walked in impatient to get to the evening’s social affair, our golden future, and my goddess waiting for me on the dance floor. I was still working but just going through the motions, which is the quickest way for a man in my line to get dead.

The election official was happy with the deal he’d brokered. A hundred grand pay-off was worth it, keeping him out of the news, and jail, too, perhaps. It stung him, though. Guys like that aren’t used to losing. It was never quite clear to me what he actually did with the Diebold voting machines in certain precincts, and in the short view it didn’t really matter. He didn’t keep his dick in his pants when he should have, and now he had to pay. It mattered to him that the woman he cheated with had set him up, and because he’d hired me it mattered to me, too. In my business, your point of view is always for sale. That’s what I’d told myself, but sometimes it was hard to stick with the game plan.

The collector and I didn’t even have time to size each other up before the bad guys came out of the shadows for the money. One covered us with the big boom end of a Beretta 93R, one opened the bag I’d carried in and counted the money, and one appeared from the front of the warehouse with Marci. What was she doing there? I silently cursed myself for the fix we were in.

I found this one snooping around, said the outside man.

The one thumbing through the money looked up and nodded. His math was good. He finished his count in no time. Apishly grinning, he studied our faces up close, searching for the frenzy-feeding fear he expected to find there. The collector did not disappoint. His legs wobbled and gave out altogether as the ape dragged him into a little anteroom where his screams confirmed that he would never get out of there alive. And then it would be our turn.

I implored Marci with my eyes to follow my lead. She let me know with a look that she understood, and when I went for the guy close to me she dropped to the floor as if in a faint. I took the guy in no time at all, then bulled into the other guy, who managed to get off one shot that stung the back of my skull going past. He was tougher than the first guy, which wasn’t going to save him, but even as I got the advantage I had the sickening feeling that I’d burned up too much time in our dance when our only hope was speed.

As number two went down and out, the third guy appeared from the other room. No surprise could help me with that one. His gun muzzle pointed right at me, not to make me stop, but to stop me dead. I zeroed in on his mouth, disfigured by the familiar smile/twitch of a cold-blooded murderer, and I knew my time on this earth could be measured in seconds.

His trigger finger tightened. I heard the echoing blast of the shots, and Marci turned into dead weight in my arms. In the second she had left our eyes locked, sharing our last expression of devotion and love. Baby Doll. That’s all she could say, then her beautiful eyes flickered and went out. In the same instant, holding her upright with my left arm, my right hand flew up. The Taurus was in it, and in another second the third man’s headless body lay twitching like a soulless, tortured thing.

When everyone’s dead around you, the sudden quiet is the loudest sound you’ll ever hear. I flashed to the dinner dance, the exotic, comforting bed beyond that, and it all came with a rush, crashing down inside me. Marci. Holding her tight, I sank to the floor, making a horrible sound I never knew I had inside me.

Chapter Two

After that I went missing. I was gone so long that my North Hollywood apartment absorbed three new tenants and four rent hikes. My Subaru Outback was impounded, auctioned, sold again, and scrapped. The lettering on the door of my old office in Studio City announced nobody and no business I knew, and my boxed up personal effects had been junked or dropped off at Goodwill. My cat had grown tired of waiting for chow and a warm body to sleep on. He moved down the street to an old lady’s house where the eats were good and the TV played all day. My bills bounced around in futile pursuit until even the collection agencies abandoned their efforts to locate me. Friends looked for me, then gave up trying to find me, too.

That’s gone.

For five years the only thing I worked at was dying. If I’d ever had any luck, any smarts, any good karma saved up, I’d trashed it. I’d been tough, a big man, to some a monster. I’d been fearless on the outside, capable of anything, swift with my gun, efficient with my fists, unorthodox but always effective with my head. I’d been called, recruited, and desired because I was good. Too good. That’s what got me, believing it. I came to believe it so much I slipped up, and that one misstep made her dead, the woman with the candlelight eyes and the make love to me, baby voice who loved me.

After that, I didn’t give a damn about anything except muffling the self-recrimination and loathing with booze. I threw up a barrier against the future with her that would never be and wallowed in the one truth: I’d failed her. But that was a doomed project. Though I died when she died in my arms from the bullets meant for me, I was still walking. Eventually I had to leave her on the cold cement floor of that miserable warehouse, stand up on wobbly legs, and walk out into a world that needed just one thing, to go fuck itself. So I burrowed into a charm bracelet of sleazy bars and stayed there, working hard to join her, working as hard at it as I’d ever worked at anything, harder, but I was tough, a big man. I wouldn’t be easy to kill. It would take time, getting dead for keeps.

The slow, pounding awareness in my skull that I was fading to black was my constant companion. If I’d gone to bed in the years I’d slipped away, I couldn’t remember. My hands shook if I didn’t keep them in my pockets. My clothes reeked with the old man smells of a middle-aged man who had gone to seed, who had gotten used to staying put wherever he fell, drenched in the stench of whatever he’d been drinking all day and night, oblivious in his own vomit, piss, and blood. Cruel flashes of specificity grew hazy: the friend I let down, who hated me; the beating I took in an alley after a bottle beat me silly inside; the woman with cascading black hair and more curves than a roller coaster, the one I loved, who loved me back and died because of me. It’s a spooky world when you lose your desire and self-respect.

Despite my best efforts, my own big death maintained its lead on me. Meanwhile, the killings didn’t stop, or the murders. I used to care about the distinction between them. Here’s a few that once made sense to me.

Kills

I killed mosquitoes because I feared the diseases they carried, the blood- sucked, red welts they left as calling cards. I killed flies that walked on shit, then hopped around on my sandwich. I killed ants that hauled off chunks of my cherry pie and deviled eggs. I killed them because there were so many and they didn’t give a damn about making polite detours to avoid me. I told myself it’s right to kill them for their lack of courtesy, and while I did it I tried not to think about someone high and mighty giving me the baleful stare. I killed in war. We rolled over guys in Iraq cowering in bunkers because we knew if we stopped they’d kill us. I killed things because I could and sometimes had to if I wanted to live with myself. I killed things because they made me itchy and sick to my stomach, slapping awake a primal fear. Sweetest of all was killing for revenge. Nothing topped it, or so I thought as I was closing in and doing it.

Murder

Murder comes from some other place, and in those so inclined it starts early. A kid murders a rat or a mouse, a cat, dog, or bird on a dare so he can fit in with other little snot-nose murderers in training. The select few keep on going, taking it to another level.

I knew a guy like that in Santa Cruz who murdered coeds for kicks. He kept one in the bathtub for a couple of weeks, taking her out to play with when he felt like it. He buried another’s head in the backyard, facing his bedroom window, so he could lie awake summer nights and talk to her. He finished off his little spree with his mother, sticking her head in the freezer because I guess he figured that’s where a mother belongs, in the kitchen. I’ve known others who roasted flesh in the fireplace, then ate it, thinking they were making themselves tougher. But I never met a murderer who was truly tough. Their obsessions create huge weaknesses, which always finish them. Murderers are crazier than most. They’re sicker, not tougher.

Who knows how it really starts for them? Maybe it begins in the womb with their crackhead mamas. Maybe drunken, belt-wielding fathers scramble their circuits; perhaps they’re dropped on their heads by older sisters who hate them. A sadistic teacher squashes them in kindergarten, or a power mad camp counselor chases them naked into a field of nettles. Maybe God’s cooks step out of the kitchen for a break on a day they’re brewing and something happens, something awful but subtle enough so the cooks miss it after their cigarettes.

Make up any story you like. Yours are as good as mine, as good as anyone’s. What matters most are the waves of suffering murderers dish out. The insane look of delight on their faces and the pain they inflict, that matters.

All that ever really mattered to me was the time it took to track them down and kill them. In the end, that was the one thing that could salvage me, and it did. My reentry began when I bumped