Killing off the Ho,Ho,Ho's

"Yeah, it fucking hurts, John."

I refrained from saying I was sorry. I could tell at the moment that would get me brained with that microscope. Opening the file I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Daniel Dickenson? What the hell?"

"You didn't think her name was Candy Samples did you?" At my incredulity look, she tilted her head. "Our Ms. Samples was born a male but had gone through full Gender Reassignment Surgery as of six months ago. Her medical records show some minor facial feminization surgery as well, done five months ago. She was on a full course of testosterone suppressors and estrogen. Other than a permanent name change, Daniel Dickenson was a woman."

My mind switched to safe mode, I continued reading. After a few words, I was so very glad I have not been here to witness this autopsy.

"Dear god."

"God had nothing to do with what was done to her." There was a bitter hate in Leia's voice.

And it was a hate I could fully understand. Candy had been eviscerated while alive. According to the crime scene photos, her intestines had been pulled out and draped around the body. I looked for cause of death and winced as I saw Hypovolemic shock. She had bled out from her injuries.

"She was stabbed in the throat?"

"Yes. Possibly the initial puncture. It severed her larynx; she asphyxiated a small quantity of blood into her lungs but, unluckily, not enough to cause repertory failure. After that, once she was silenced, the killer began to punish her. Knife wounds placed to torture, not kill quickly. Someone was very certain they had all the time in the world."

I realized what was on her mind. She was remembering her own recent capture and torture by someone ... with all the time to make someone hurt they wanted to take.

"Leia ..."

"No, John. Don't even try." She took a deep breath. "Candy was alive when the killer pulled her stomach out and draped it around like so much rope."

"Not rope. Garland. She was killed by someone dressed as Santa Claus."

Leia slowly turned to look at me. "John ... normally I don't ask you how you figured something out, because you spend two days explaining, but ... how the hell do you know that?"

"Huntress' little phone trick. I got to listen to the murder. Candy called her killer ... Santa." I looked back at the file for the forensic taken from the body. "Small red fibers. White fur. Semen ... ah, you can ignore that. Was there any evidence of hair? Like a long white strand of beard hair?"

"John, why should I ignore the semen?" Her tone was one I hate to hear in her lovely voice.

"Ah, well because it's mine."

For a moment she stood there looking at me as if

I had grown another head. Her eyes left mine and she looked down at her report on the table. "John I sent that sample of for DNA testing. Your DNA is on file. It will come back as a positive for you."

"That's what I meant, just ignore it."

"John!' She stabbed the open file with a finger. "This already went to the captain. The lab will send the results to him as well."

Oh, well if this isn't a lovely Christmas Eve surprise. On par with the chain rattling ghost of Marley. Well now indeed. "So I have a few days then I'm a suspect?"

"You might have till New Year's if you're very lucky. Holiday backlog and all that." She paused and looked at me. "It was a clean semen sample, no foreign intrusions. I thought that miraculous given all the blood. John ... why did Candy have your semen on her at the time of death?"

"Because about ten minutes before she was attacked, she was giving me head in my car." At Leia's look, I shrugged. "A pay for play situation."

Leia Stood there just looking at me for a moment. So very slowly her head began to shake from side to side. "John, do you remember why you're in Witness Protection? Why you're not to be running around this city, looking like you look now, hanging out with the kind of people that keeps Vice so busy? Do you remember? The whole 'kill you on sight' thing that got put on you all those years ago. Do you think that has gone away after what happened with Joshua? And in your damn car! John all it takes is someone seeing you in that car and tracing a tag number and they have you. Witness Protection's promises won't mean spit if you screw it up. What are going to do when they burn your house down around your ears?"

"Roast marshmallows?" I stopped at her look. Her hand was creeping towards that microscope again. I shrugged apologetically "I was on my back from buying groceries, stopped to have a drink. She asked if I wanted to give a girl a ride. I had some spare cash and figured why not?"

"You're the dumbest smart man on the fucking planet. You're going to die in some back alleyway just because you're bored. Or horny!"

She walked off shaking her head.

After a second of watching her ass again, I went back to my reading. I absorbed all the details and filed them away in my file storage of a brain. Unfortunately, that very computer-like ability to never forget things wouldn't let me forget the things I don't want to remember. Candy's sweet face, with her mouth distended by my cock between her lips, would have been a pleasant memory for me, but now the image from the crime scene wanted to overlay that. The ragged bloody ruin she had for a midriff. The lines of pain permanently etched into her expression.

I felt my nausea rise and fished out a cigarette from my pocket case. The old gold and diamond case was another thing I could never forget. Nor the way I acquired it.

Gold doesn't stain no matter how much blood is spilled on it.

The hot burn, the soft breath, the full feeling. I stare at my lighter flame in a second of meditation. Another souvenir of my wicked past, it, however, did have a few stains. The buzz from the dokha-blended Arabic cigarette tobacco washed over me; bring back its own memories. Egypt. Jordan. Lebanon. Some pleasant memories, some more horrible than any other I possess.

"God damn it, John. Those things stink."

"Most find the smell pleasant," I said, my mind still in a little village far, far way.

"I don't."

Her finality of tone drew me back. "I've got to go. I'll call you for our date."

"I'll be holding my breath," she said.

"An apology, dinner, a gift and a night to make your toes curl. I promise all of those before New Year's Eve." I stood looking at her for a moment. "So long as I'm not arrested."

"Not and acceptable excuse."

With a pensive nod, I walked toward the door.

"John?"

"Yes, Leia?"

"Stand me up and I will spread it all over the force that you were with a tranny." At my sudden look, she grinned. "And I'll even doctor my files to show she had incredible sex before she died."

"You wouldn't do that. Not your style."

"John, I don't have a style when it comes to vengeance."

As I left I thought that over. Standing by the street flagging down one of those expensive cabs, I had to agree ... about her at least. I, on the other hand, did have a style for vengeance. One I had refined through the years.

And it was vicious as hell.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

There's something meditative about riding on a city bus. I learned that years ago when I found out, to my dismay, that half the town I lived in wanted to kill me. I was too poor at that time to afford a loaf of bread, but I would scrape together bus fare and ride from one side of the city to the other. So long as I kept in motion I could kid myself that I was evading the ones wanting my head on a platter. Didn't really work at the end, they got me, I got beat, I got them and they went away to a place with no windows.

But the time on those buses changed me.

When I need to think, I'd find a crosstown headed to no place special. And here on Christmas Eve, I pretty much had the whole vehicle to myself. Just me and a bored bus driver doing huge circles around the city when he wanted to be home.

Some of the things Leia had said to me were sticking in the tenderest of places. My pride. My ego. My often complete lack of humility. Those could kill me and I would die accepting that I had lived as I wanted.

But was I really going to get killed because I was bored?

Looking out the window, I found myself focusing on my own reflection. The man staring back at me was not the man he once been. Oh, my mind was certainly more filled with useless shit than when I had been young, dumb, and full of cum. But ....

Shaking my head to kick off this maudlin mood, I looked again over the autopsy file for Candy, aka Daniel Dickenson. I didn't need to flip through the copy; I could see the pages as clear as if they were before me. It told me a lot of things about her killer. Things even the normal police procedure won't always pick up, but that's why they call me in from time to time. Because I see those things.

Her killer was either a deranged psycho, a modern Jack the Ripper looking to punish the daughters of the night for their sins. Or he was someone she knew. Her wounds told of hate for something. Whether it was prostitutes in general or Candy, in particular, was in question. There was also the possibility that this was a transgender hate crime.

I hated myself at that moment.

Clear as the purest crystal were the memories of my youth, when I had joined in the beating of "drag-fags" as we had called them back then. Some people could look back on their past and ask questions like "Well, how many was it that we hurt?"

Not me.

Never me.

Like everything else the number was written in letters of fire a mile high, and I need only think of a tiny thing to set them ablaze again before my eyes. And seeing Candy's pale body on a steel slab, the Y-incision, her lifeless face ... that was for me no tiny thing.

Again my eyes went back to the man in the window, a reflection of a reflection of the man I once was. Perhaps I should be thankful for that. Perhaps ....

And there are other times when buses are simple depressing as all hell.

Stepping off the empty bus at a random stop, I realized what I had subconsciously done. I was standing not fifty feet from where my car had been parked. I could almost feel phantom lips upon my cock as I walked across that spot and turned the corner of the building, following in Candy's last footsteps.

A tatter of yellow police tape hung like garland off the iron handrail of a brownstone townhouse. More of that yellow tinsel--fragments that caught the light--was present in the bark of a half-dead poplar tree.

Someone had cleaned away the red snow.

Given what had been done to her, there should have been a trace of Candy left here and there, but the police cleanup crews had been thorough. Looking up at the heavily draped windows of the brownstone, I had to wonder if the owners had stood and watched Candy die. I'm sure they would never admit to such an act. But they might have done it. Perhaps just as the people of Kew Gardens had stood at their windows and watched the twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese be murdered. But people only dream they want to be heroes. When the real crunch comes often people just stand and watch?

In the distance, I heard church bells ringing.

I didn't need to look at my watch to know that it was now Christmas. And with snow falling on my shoulders, I knew that I was not bored. And I sure as hell wasn't what anyone could call a hero. But I'm not one to stand and watch either, so if this old city and the scum not washed into the gutters yet want to kill me for that, well they can always give it a try. They won't be the first.

Probably not the last either.

Standing there with snow on my head, in a personal fog of lies and self-delusions, I came to realize something. I was looking right into a pair of eyes. And they were looking right back at me.

When I moved, the eyes vanished behind a window blind.

I've never been good a stealth. I've spent too many years as the kick the door in type. But, given how many times that approach has gotten me shot, and that it was Christmas, I decided to try a bit of sneaky sneak. Just for shits and giggles.

Moving to the window I saw that it was a foldout type, the kind which lead to shitty basement apartments. As I was looking at the blind it moved and, for a half-second, the eyes reappeared.

Two things. They were not far from the window sill. And the mouth under them had braces.

The fight or flight settled down and I waited for the kid to come back. Curiosity may kill cats but it's got nothing on young children. They are fiends in miniature. And I knew without having to even ask, that this child had seen what no child should ever have to see.

The eyes came back.

"Hello, there. I'm John."

Blink. Blink. Blink.

"Taline?"

Holy shit, I'm famous. Someone call my agent and book me for tours on the Today Show, The View, or, given my luck, the Maury Provich show.

"That's right."

"Are you going to kill Santa?" There wasn't fear of that in this kid's voice, as there should be, but a desperate hope.

"You saw Santa, didn't you? What's your name, by the way? You know mine, fairs fair."

"I'm Timmy."

Kneeling down by the window, I looked at this little boy that wanted me to kill Santa. I had to wonder if his parents knew that their son had seen Candy being killed.

"Well Timmy, I'm trying to help the police find the person who hurt the lady out here."

"She wasn't a lady. Daddy says she was a he and that he got what he deserved for being a ...per ...perv ...perurt--"

"You don't need to know that word, Timmy. It's not a nice one. Now I want you to listen to me real good, okay?"

He nodded his little head off.

"That wasn't Santa. That was a fake Santa, doing bad things, to make people like you scared of Christmas." I tilted my head a bit to match his. "You're not going to let him get away with being bad, are you?"

"No. Are you going to, Mr. Taline?"

After a second, I shook my head "No, I'm not."

Timmy sat there quiet for a moment then took a deep breath. "Santa threw something into the trash dumpster. That one over there."

Looking across the street, I saw a construction company was doing a renovation on a small building. They had a large trash container sitting on the sidewalk.

"Thank you, Timmy. Now you should probably get to sleep. The real Santa will be bringing you presents in the morning." I started to stand up but stopped when he shook his head.

"Daddy said Santa doesn't have our address anymore."

Memories can flay the skin off me like whips. That phrase was more like hot chains with hooks on the ends.

"I'll give your address to him. I promise Timmy."

"Really? Thank you, Mr. Taline."

"Get to bed."

Leaving the boy to sugar plum dreams, I stepped through the slushy street to the trash container. It was as tall as myself, but years ago I had been an explorer of such things. I knew how dumpster dive with the best of them. Climbing the few ladder rungs, I stepped over the edge and placed my feet on broken drywall, hoping against all hope the whole time that I wasn't going to get a nail through my foot for my troubles this night.

Ah, the glamorous life of a private dick. Hip deep in construction debris, on Christmas, at half past midnight. Hold me back from the joys of my life.

"Well, fuck me to tears, Agnes." Sitting down on something painful, I fished a plastic baggy from the inside pocket of my coat. Looking around I snagged a piece of all-threaded rod and picked up the tangle of white hair from the bottom of the dumpster. It looked like a dead poodle.

It wasn't. It was the proof I need that this Santa was as fake as Madonna's British accent. One very bloody tangle of white hair and elastic straps.

I put the fake beard into the bag and proceeded to try and get this damn two-by-four out my prostate. Wet snow on wet steel, however, did lead to me falling my ass out the trash container.

To the merry laughter of a little child.

"Timmy! Go to sleep!"

** ** ** ** ** ** **

Leia Morgain lives in a very nice house.

At one time I spent almost as much time under its snow covered roof than I did my own. It's not as romantic as it sounds. Not like we were all boyfriend and girlfriend, let me leave some underwear over here on the floor. No, it was more like I was sleeping in her crawlspace on a worn mattress, hiding myself from the world and those in it that wanted to reenact the Crucifixion with my balls and a nail gun.

Speaking of balls, God Damn my nuts still hurt.

That dumpster crawl was a mistake. The fall off it was an even worse one since it now feels like I pulled something. Groin muscles pulls can be so much fun. I almost tore one once with a Taiwanese hooker named Silvia ... let's just say that time was worth the pain.

This time, not so much.

Checking my six was habit. A soldier's habit that I never lost, but then again, I can never really lose any habit I pick up. Again, my screwed up mind at play.

It was only past two in the morning, I can't for the life of me wonder why it took Leia so long to open her door. The pale pink nightgown peeking out from under her rose-red robe was one I had gotten her years ago. I remember peeling her out of it. More than once.

"John? Oh, for fuck sake let me get something to throw at you."

"Run this first." I shoved the baggie into her hands. "You will find Candy's blood on it. I'm hoping for some of the killer's as well. This is the beard he was wearing when he killed her."

Leia looked at the bloody hair in the bag I gave her for a second then at me. "How? Where?"

"In a dumpster across from the crime scene. Also, there was a witness. A boy named Timmy saw it from his window." I handed her a wad of bills. "Buy him a bunch of toys for Christmas. He thinks he's not getting any. I promised him he would."

"John ..."

"Merry Christmas, Leia. I've got to go, I can't stay."

She gave me a confused nod.

Walking away, I circled the block and returned to her house from the backyard. Leia had already turned her lights back off. I could easily picture her dropping her robe and climbing back into that big California King bed, sliding in among the many types of smooth sheets. Satin. Sateen. Silk. Ten billion thread count cotton. Her skin smoother than all of them.

My eyes went to the small door, the one that for a half-year was the entrance and exit to my bedroom. Curious, I crossed her backyard opened the hatch and looked inside. Reaching up above the door, I found the switch I had installed there easily enough.

"Let there be light," I whispered as the crawlspace became visible. Years ago I stole a string of lights from a constructions site in the middle of the night. A little time reading a wiring manual and I was a qualified enough electrician to tie in this string and install the switch. Least ways I didn't burn down Leia's house.

Duck walking into the crawlspace, I stood up. Crawlspace is a misnomer; the space is closer to five foot even six foot tall in places. A crooked neck will get you through most of it well enough. The spiders have returned to string dusty webs back between the floor rafters again. I had spent a few days evicting them ... once upon a time. When something like that had been the best way to pass a day.

My second-hand mattress was still there, laid on two pallets to keep it off the floor. The floor was still hard packed enough and there was not much dampness. My chair. My small table. The stack of blocks and boards that made up my now empty book rack. The books that had kept me from going mad down here.

This had been my life. Living like a hermit. Just trying to survive one more day.

Sitting down in my chair, I wanted to laugh. And how is today any different from that time? Investigating a murder I'm going to be accused of. Trying to find a killer ... why? For Candy? A girl I knew for all of the time it took her to earn some cash on my cock. For her maniac sister? Someone I would happily beat the snot out of.