EIGHTEEN

As Christian screeched to a halt and staggered from the abandoned cab, feeling his way down the alley with his hands and fleeing the madness behind him, there was only one thought in his mind.  Completion.  Nothing mattered if he could achieve that.  Nothing was important beyond the art, the images. He would own this night, and this vision.  He would not fail, would not be sent to prison, without finishing what he had set out to do.

He cursed himself for a fool, cursed Gates for a weak idiot, cursed the woman, Madeline, for sucking him in yet again, pushing him further than he'd meant to go, holding him with her eyes.  It had become a game.  He had fallen into his mother's old habit of explaining each new pain and each new. Sentence fragment

He should have finished quickly, should have been an artist and not a rutting animal.  He'd gloated before he'd reached completion like some kind of cartoon villain.  He had fallen prey to pride over something he'd yet to accomplish, and the woman had led him into it, just as his mother would have so many years in the past.

She'd held him with the elusive perfection he'd sought and he'd failed.  Instead of reaching out to grasp it and pull it to himself in triumph, he'd watched as it was yanked away, and he'd done nothing.

Christian staggered across the street.  He swept his gaze warily from side to side.  He heard no sirens, and he saw no headlights.  So far he was okay.  So far they hadn't seen the cab or figured out where he was heading.

It wasn’t a popular hour to be out in this part of town, not a time when these particular streets shared their world with men. He moved across a silent landscape, an empty shell void of life. It was like a chiaroscuro photograph, and he blended with it as well as he could. 

He slipped back into the alley on the far side of the street and saw his goal ahead, standing out like an oasis in a desert.  There was still hope.  Where he had vision, he had hope, and the vision was returning to him, sure, strong and intensified.

He staggered down the alley, bouncing off the walls, and crashed through a line of trashcans.  They toppled and spilled, but he paid no attention.  He fished in his pocket, praying that in the scuffle, in all the writhing and moaning while the bitch had owned his flesh, that he'd not lost his keys. 

At first his groping fingers came up empty, and a dry whimper escaped his lips, but then he felt them.  They were there, and he would make it.  He had to.  He had the vision, the keys, and the equipment.  Nothing was lost if he kept his cool and moved quickly.

He half lurched, half fell against the solid wood surface of the back door to his studio, leaned heavily on the wall and fumbled in the shadows for the keyhole.  He found it, inserted the key, turned it and he was in. 

It was just as dark inside, but it was warmer and more comfortable.  The familiarity of the place washed over him, welcoming him home and back to work.

He wasn't fooling himself.  They would find him.  They would be there, probably very soon.  He had no time to think or prepare.  He had to work quickly and on pure instinct; that was better.  It would sweeten his victory.  It was himself against time, against the critics, against the image of his mother and the cruel, painful twist of her lips as she laughed at him.

His arms ached where he'd crashed through the window, his knee felt as if it were on fire, and he knew there must be blood all over him.  It didn't matter.  Not as long as enough flowed through his veins to keep him upright, and not as long as he could work.  He could use the pain as a focus, could use it to help him concentrate on the vision.

He locked the door carefully and pulled a small worktable and a chair standing nearby to cover it.  He didn't believe it would slow anyone for long, but it was something.  It made him feel more secure. Every second might mean the difference between success and eternal loss.

He did the same thing in the front office, sliding the couch across the floor to the door and piling the various chairs and end tables that were scattered around the small lobby in front of the entrance.  He couldn't really lift them on top of the couch, but he could make a mess of it.  It would take a few moments to get through.

This done, he hurried into his studio and closed that door as well.  Moving mechanically, he sorted quickly through his supplies and inventoried what he would need.  He piled it all on the counter.  He cursed himself for not maintaining the studio as he always had, for not having it in meticulous, perfect condition. It was another sign of the insidious traps he'd fallen into.

He concentrated, shutting out everything else.  He didn't listen for the sirens to wail down the street outside, though he knew they would come, and he knew what would happen when they did. 

He would not be denied this moment.  Not by that bitch Madeline, not by that idiot Gates, not by his own weakness or inability to focus.  He was destined for immortality.

Luckily things were pretty much set up from previous shoots, from thousands of meaningless portraits of empty faces and nameless families.  They were his past, dead to him.  The world was dead to him.  He was transcending, reaching out to his dream and embracing it.  Only one image remained.

The cuts and bruises covering his arms and legs ached, but he used the pain to help mold the image and focus it in his mind's eye.  What he needed was pure, unblemished, and had to be beyond reproach

Sweat broke out on his brow and soaked his hair.  He set up the drop cloth, bright, forest green, draping it over the divan in the corner of the studio.  The table was out, the chair not compliant with the image.  He saw these things as he worked, each time making the correct choice.  Each piece of the puzzle fell into place with practiced ease.  

These were the mechanics of his art.  If mechanics had been all there were, if they were all that mattered, he would have been famous long ago.  With the lights, the lenses, the filters and backdrops, he was a genius.  He had never doubted his technical ability, even throughout college and his later years in this studio.

His lack had been vision.  Then, when the vision had begun to blossom and the images had begun to imprint themselves, itching at his mind to bring them to life and immortalize them, they’d been beyond his reach.  For years they had remained beyond his groping mind’s focus.

He had them now.  Every one of them.  There was something in each, something he needed and had to recover, something that would make it all work out.  Other models were for the prodigies, it seemed.  The artists were chosen at a young age, chosen from the rich elite.  Only a rare few made a name for themselves by their talent.  He didn't need a super model to create. Only a lesser artist needed that.  Christian was complete unto himself.

He'd already been trapped in a world of grinning four year olds and cocky teenagers, family portraits and senior pictures. He'd seen flashes in those years, visions that would have set him free, but he'd always been denied.  Always, when the images seemed within his reach, they'd been snatched free.

He'd never had the chance to grow with his art, to learn the things he'd needed most to be complete.  His vision was true, but his humanity was flawed.  His mother had warped and deranged his childhood, had put the glitches into place that stained his work for years to come.

Christian saw art only where it was unattainable; saw perfect images through flawed lenses.  It had been a learning experience, a growing experience.  It had made him stronger and more intense.  It had brought him to this, his greatest moment, and his final challenge.  It had brought him back to the source of the problem, and the solution.  It had brought him back to her.

He searched quickly through the cabinets for the only camera he'd left behind.  It was buried deep in behind a carton of film, and he tossed the film aside, dragging the case free and unsnapping it with a wistful smile.  It was the camera he'd owned when he opened the shop, the only one he'd been able to afford.  He'd used it in college.  It was a simple model, professional, but with few features.  Everything needed to be done manually.

That was as it should be, he knew.  Every switch setting, every meter reading and nuance of balance between light and shadow had to come from him.  There could be no outside influence.  The women had proven it.  The bitch had solidified it.  He could not work with a model.  There was nothing there for him, no control, and no way to keep his weak flesh from succumbing when his mind wanted only to be released to create.

He snapped a tripod together quickly, screwed the camera onto it and fastening it in place, digging through the old case until he came up with the flash attachment and connecting it to the camera body.

There was a small sink in one corner of the room, and it was here that he went next.  He sat on the stool in front of the sink, catching his reflection in the mirror above it, and laid his hands on the hard, cold porcelain surface gently.  Here he would need a moment, a bit of time to think.  Here the images would solidify for the final time and transmit from mind to hands to film.  Here was the key to art.

Blanking all thoughts from his mind, losing himself in the images and gazing into his own, worn eyes, framed with sweat and dried blood, he sat.  If it took all night, it took all night, but he knew it would be quick.  The vision was pure and immediate.  It would urge him onward, would finish itself with his body, his mind, only the vessels through which it would flow.  He lost himself in his work.

Her eyes floated before him, her lips moved, singing to him and telling him what to do with his hands.  He gave over the control one last time, gave it to his vision, to his memories, to this purest of them all.

* * *

Mac read the address aloud, and Tommy winced.  It was across town, further than he'd expected, and they'd already lost a lot of time.  Would the freak still be there?  Would he sit, injured and licking his wounds, or would he pounce, playing the part of the cornered beast?  There was no fucking way to know, nothing to do but to dive in and see how the water felt.

Tommy was running on pure adrenalin now, the blood pumping so fiercely through his veins that he had to hold his mind in check to keep it concentrated on the road.  It wanted to wander, to charge, to be anywhere but waiting behind that fucking wheel as the miles unraveled far too slowly beneath him.

Tommy drifted back as he drove. His father's face flickered through his mind, and he heard the gravelly voice and saw the clear, piercing blue of the man's eyes.

"You watch your back, Tommy boy, and you never let them out of your sights.  You may think you know another man, may even think you can see through to his soul, but don't you ever believe it.  No matter how dark, no matter how sick the bastard may be, there is more.  Never underestimate a man.  There's no monster on television or in the movies to match him.  You watch your back."

Those words had meant so little to him then.  They'd seemed the meanderings of a father too caught up in the trials of life, too blind to see the wonder, the flash and glitter of his own world. 

Tommy had bought into the act, had seen the guns, the flashy cars, had watched the movies and read the books, "Serpico," "The Supercops," and he'd heard his father, his uncle, his cousin, even, through letters not meant for his eyes.

None of it had sunk in.  Only reality could do that.  Only the kind of sickness in a man that can bring the entire contents of your stomach up to lodge in your throat, sending you hacking and coughing into a corner, reduced to a quivering mass of flesh, could brand the truth into place.  Tommy knew, now, and it was that knowledge that fed his fear, pounding it through him.

His father was gone.  Dead.  He'd watched his back – he'd never underestimated a man, and the fuckers had gotten him anyway.  Nothing was enough.  Nothing could truly stop the madness.

His Uncle, Max Doyle, cousin? Patrick's father.  Years and years on the force, putting away hundreds, maybe thousands of criminals, taking it all in and shoveling it all away.  He'd watched his back, hadn't once slipped in the line of fire.   He'd been shot in a convenience store robbery while off duty.  No chance to watch his back then, and seemingly no reason to fear.

That was a fallacy, Tommy knew.  It was something he'd learned to live with, to use to his advantage.  There was always a reason to fear.  There was always a psycho, just around the corner, and there was no way, absolutely no – fucking – way to tell who it might be.  Wherever he went, he watched.  Whoever he was with, he wondered what they were thinking, what really made them tick.

The psychos were old, young, successful, bums and they were everywhere.  He'd been close to cracking enough times to recognize that the potential in others.  He'd felt himself inside their minds, and had felt them inside his own, and he knew them only too well.

God had fucked up making Man, if perfection was what he was after.  What man had turned out to be was a time bomb, a living, walking breathing death trap, insecure, cruel, and ready to deal death to his brother at a moment's notice.

This newest nut case was different, worse, in some ways.  He was a freak of the first order, sexual abuse, murder, fetishes, and yet there was stability to what he did.  He didn't go off half-cocked, grabbing the first victim he could get his hands on and throwing it to the cops, hoping to be caught.  He seemed intent on some goal, or on some warped ideal.

It didn't seem that killing was important to him.  Not in any real sense.  Tommy couldn't picture the man who'd done that makeup; the man who'd taken those photos, obsessing with something as simple as the death of another human being.  He wasn't a serial killer in the normal sense.  He was something worse.

There was no emotion involved, not for the victims.  Not for anyone, really.  All there was were the photos, the creation of warped images.  The death was incidental, and that was what was truly frightening.

There were dead people lining up behind this guy like the washed off debris of some rising storm, dead people Tommy had sworn an oath to protect.  They weren't the highbrow, rich citizens that paid the taxes that paid his salary, nor were they the solid working folk whose backs shouldered the load bulk? of the city's workload.  They were on the fringe, beyond the line where they became the enemy.

That was a trap Tommy wasn't prepared to fall into, though. He wouldn't presume to judge any of them, not even Gates.  They did what they did and he did what he did.  All of them had their place in the world.  No matter what they did, no matter how fucked up their lives might be, they didn't deserve to die. 

No matter what they might have done in their lives that would turn the stomachs of everyday people, those girls hadn't deserved to be killed, or to be raped, and they certainly didn't deserve to be remembered last in those humanity stealing pictures, those demented reminders of Tommy’s personal enemy of the moment.  They didn't deserve to be the possessions of a freak that didn't even care.

That was it, he suddenly realized, and he glanced over at Mac as they turned down the last street, heading for the front of the building that housed the freak's studio.  It wasn't the killings; it wasn't even the way the girls had been abused, made-up like porcelain china-dolls and filled with the freaks diseased semen.  It was the photographs.

He couldn't get them out of his mind.  He couldn't correlate the dead girls he'd seen and those prints, couldn't bond them in his mind.  It was as if the images had been stolen, the moments in time frozen, transferred to photo paper, and taken away.  It left the corpses violated in a way he'd never imagined, left them emptier, even, than if the guy had just raped and killed them.

Christ.  And the pictures were beautiful.  If he'd just seen them somewhere, not having a clue what they were, where they came from, he might have been tempted to buy one or two for his walls.  For his wallet.  Hell, he might have kept the fuckers by his bed.  He would have sensed something, would have seen the darkness in the depths of their beauty, he knew, but his mind would have warped it. 

One thing Tommy knew from years of experience with things that should not be.  If it shouldn't be, the mind would find another explanation, and that was the one that would stick.  No matter that the facts stared you in the face, no matter that nothing you could do would change one iota of what already was, the mind would gloss it over. 

He would have seen the death in those photos, would have felt the control the man had felt when he snapped them, the utter potency of life and death authority, but his mind would have registered lust.  It was simple survival.

Tommy pulled to a stop, dimmed his lights, and they stared at the front of the building.  There was light inside, but it was dim – a back room?  There was no evidence that anyone was inside, or that anyone had been inside. 

"How about the back?" Mac asked, pointing at the alley running along the side of the building.  Tommy followed his partner's finger, nodding quickly.

They both slipped from the car, moving silently and swiftly, guns drawn.  There was little traffic on the streets, not like the downtown area they were more used to.  The streets were empty and desolate, like those of a concrete ghost town.  Their steps rang hollowly, loudly, though they moved with all the stealth they could muster.

"You try here," Tommy gestured at the front of the building, "I'll check the back.  If you get in, make some noise, something to let me know.  I'll do the same.  We don't want him slipping out the other side this time.  The freak has got to go down."

Mac nodded and headed for the front door.  Tommy slipped off along the side of the building and melted into the shadows of the alley, moving swiftly.  He rounded the corner, swung his gun up to chest height, swept down, then up, scanned the alley and tracked the barrel with his eyes.

There was nothing.  He was alone.  He moved toward the back door slowly, inching along the wall and ducked under a window to get to the door itself.  No way to know if he was being watched, if the freak even knew they were there.  Christ.

The door was locked.  He turned the knob gently, felt the resistance, and cursed.  It figured.

The lights inside were brighter from where he stood.  Shadows played over the walls and moved across the ceiling.  He heard a clatter, as if something had fallen, then silence.  It seemed they hadn't been given away yet.  The guy was doing something and was not paying attention.

"Fuck," he grated.  He hauled back with one booted foot, letting it slam forward and into the door, just below the lock. There was a splintering sound, but the lock didn't quite give.  He curse, drew back, and kicked out again.

The wood cracked and the deadbolt flew into the interior of the studio, but the door did not swing inward.  He pressed his shoulder against it, but it wouldn’t budge.  Grabbing the light from his belt, Tommy swung the beam up to the crack he'd opened, and he cursed again.

There was a small worktable barring his path, and it had managed to jam itself at an angle under the door when he kicked it inward.  The freak had done it by accident, but the door was not going to open easily. 

Tommy knelt with sweat pouring from his hair to soak his shirt and burn in his eyes.  Where was the guy?  What was he doing?  Did he have a gun?  He glanced into the crack he'd opened, spun back to the wall and waited.  Nothing.  There was no change in the sounds from inside, except that they had possibly grown more frantic.  The shadows danced more quickly across the ceiling.

He grabbed the leg of the desk and heaved.  It was wedged good, but he was able to wiggle it just a bit.  It started to come loose.  Across the building from him, he heard a roar. Mac had fired. 

Christ!  Was the psycho trying to bolt?  Was Mac okay?  Shit!  Tommy wrenched the table aside and rolled into the room, playing his light and gun over the walls in a quick arc, holding them together so that the beam traced the barrel's path.  Time to rock and roll!

* * *

Christian was just putting on the finishing touches, lining the eyes, dabbing in the final colors, when he heard the steps out back. He ignored them, hurried his fingers at their tasks, absorbed in the image he faced in the mirror.

 His time was almost up, but he would make it.  There was nothing that could stop him now. Nothing.  He smiled, and the image smiled back, and it sent a chill up his spine.  So perfect.

He laid his utensils down, moved to where the camera sat perched on its tripod.  It was already focused carefully, aperture and shutter speed set.  The flash was attached and primed.  Everything was ready for the shot, the ultimate roll of film.  He smiled, but only slightly.  He twisted one last setting to the right and released the button.

Walking quickly across the room, he slid onto the divan, felt the softness of the green silk against his skin, let his limbs slip into a comfortable position, and then carefully pulled them into place.  He arranged them so that the light would catch just right, so that nothing would be left to chance. He glanced above his head.

He'd seen this position so many times, had been forced to watch, to see fingers trace its curves, to trace them himself.  He knew it as well as his own face and had made it his own form.

The scotch glass was right where he'd left it.  The liquid contents glistened, capturing glimmers of light from the spots and reflecting them back at him, at the room.  He saw a surreal, elongated image of his face in the side of the glass, and he had a momentary pang of remorse, another lost image.  Lost for so long, and found only to be his last memory.

There was a crash from the back door, but he ignored it.  He reached up and grabbed the glass.  The timer on the camera whirred and grew louder as it neared the short beep that would launch him into the annals of history.  Christian Greve, artist. Immortal.

He knew now what he'd missed before.  It was so simple, so implicit to the process he'd been developing that he had bypassed it completely.  He'd focused so intently on the models. It had been their fault he was a failure, their shortcomings that had ruined the images.  Just as it had been his own shortcomings that his mother had blamed her failing beauty on, her inability to reach for her dreams and grasp them.

True.  It was the models that had been the problem, but the source of the problem was his vision.  He'd strayed from his true path, strayed from the art.  He'd allowed the desire of his flesh to taint his vision, dragging him into that whirlpool of lust and depravity that had brought him so close to the brink of success, so close to his dreams, and dashed him time and time again against the rocky wall of failure.

He was the image.  The only true vision he could ever produce, the only untainted image he could ever save for posterity, was his own - hers.  His self, his soul.  Her soul.  He saw that now that the process was not flawed, only his choice of subject matter was to blame.  He should have known that it had chosen him. 

He could know the women intimately, might even have breached the walls with Madeline, given the time, but he could never become them.  He could never truly experience what they experienced in the moment of the flash, the instant of captured reality.  Their flesh was not his flesh.  Their souls were their own, even in death.

Christian’s images, the one's he'd stolen from so many faces, so many personalities and situations, were never what they'd seemed.  They were pale reflections, clues to the path he should be treading.  They were the guideposts that had brought him to where he lay, and when the timer went off, it's tiny Beep! Beep! ringing loudly in the silence, he lifted the glass, and he drank to success.

As the camera flashed, the film advanced one image at a time, and Christian heard the deafening thunder of gunfire.  He heard the wrench of the furniture in the back being tossed aside, the soft thud of a body coming in.  It didn't matter.

His mind was fading.  He felt his stomach heave back up what he'd offered it, and he clamped down the muscles in his throat and tightened his lips.  He tried to roll his tongue back and fill the gap.  Nothing could be allowed to mar the image or to ruin the perfection.

He felt heat flow through him, then numbness, and finally, as the room erupted in flash after flash, removing his sight, removing the room and the world beyond that glowing, glittering sun of brilliance across the room, he drifted away.  His back arched, his heart gave a lurch, and he was unable to stop his hand, in the end, from leaping to his throat, trying to force the poison up and out, and failing.

In the darkness he saw her reach out to him across the void to pull him close.  He tasted the salt of her tears, breathed the scent of her perfume, of her sex. Her eyes called out to his, and they blended, his gift to her.  Her beauty, preserved. Her image, his own.  One for eternity.

He gasped a final word, but none heard it, none in this world.  "Mother..."

* * *

Tommy whipped his gun back and forth and scanned the shadows, but there was no one in sight.  He slipped through the door to the lobby and saw that Mac was wrestling with a pile of furniture in front of the door.  The lock, or what had been the lock, was blown free of the wooden frame completely, lying in splinters on the floor.  Tommy wondered fleetingly what had become of the fucking Swiss army knife method, but he had no time to dwell on it.

There was one more doorway leading to the back room of the building, and he moved toward it.  If he turned to help his partner, there was no telling what the freak might pull, or where he might run.  The motherfucker wasn't getting away this time.  End of the line.

Even years of training couldn't prepare a man for a moment like the one he was living.  The scent of death filled the air, familiar and heavy.  The only question that remained was – whose death?  How many psychos does it take to get to the center, Owl?  He breathed, trying not to break into hysterical laughter at the image of the commercial that was flashing through his brain.  "One?  Two?  Thureeuh..."

He grabbed the knob of the studio door.  Beneath it flashes of light strobed, one after the other.  There was a mechanical whirring sound accompanying the lights, and he realized with a shock that it was a camera.  The fucking freak was taking pictures.

Bleak images flitted through Tommy’s mind.  He pictured a camera, focused on the door, ready to frame his face as the psycho planted a bullet between his eyes, or whipped out a straight razor from beside the door to open his grin a little wider.  He erased them, erased all thought and concentrated on that doorknob.

Twisting it slowly, he pushed on the door and felt it give instantly.  Not locked.  Tommy pulled back to one side, and with a scream, he kicked it open and backed around the wall, pressing against it with all his strength and watching the doorway for motion.

All that met his gaze was the flashing of the bulb, monotonous, and bizarre.  Mac materialized next to him, and he saw his partner's face, then not, then he could see it again as the lights played with their senses.

Finally the camera stopped.  There was a loud click, a final whirr, and silence.  Tommy waited for another few seconds for the freak to make a move, and then he dove through the doorway, taking the fall in a roll and coming up with his gun at eye level, sweeping the room left-to-right, high, and then low.  Mac was on the other side, emulating his movements.  Their eyes met in the center, and they froze.

They knelt like statues, guns aimed and useless in grips gone numb.  There were lights planted all over the room at odd angles.  Each shone on a small divan across the room, highlighting a separate portion of the sight that burned itself into their brains.

Christian Greve was sprawled across the seat, perched atop a green silk backdrop cloth.  He wore no clothing at all, and his skin was an unearthly pale white, the skin of a man who'd never really known the sun.

His face was made up exquisitely.  He did not look like a man at all, in fact, but like a woman, an aged, but very beautiful woman.  The makeup enhanced his features, strengthened them.  The man's eyes were dead and haughty and arrogant.  They stared straight through the intruders, as though they were insignificant.

The man had one hand wrapped around his penis, which was half-erect in death.  The other lay lightly against his throat, but it didn't look out of place.  Somehow it was the perfect offset for the bizarre scenario, the perfect accent to the image. 

Beside him a glass had fallen away, a few stray drops of liquid rolling from the rim to stain the cloth beneath it.  A second small dribble ran down the left corner of his mouth, but from where they stood, and no doubt from where the camera stood, it appeared to be a harsh wrinkle or an age line. 

"Holy shit," Tommy breathed, lowering his gun stupidly and falling to both knees as his tension slipped away.  His limbs felt like they were held together with rubber and his mind was numb.

"The son of a bitch killed himself," Mac said matter-of-factly.  "He fucking killed himself, and he got away.  He took fucking pictures Tommy.  What kind of a man takes pictures of his own dead body?"

Tommy spun his head to look at his partner, ripping his eyes from the grisly image before them, hearing the sirens rise behind them and feeling relief and resignation warring in his mind.  "A fucking psycho, Mac, just a fucking psycho.  Don't you ever forget man," he added, as he staggered to his feet, holding out one hand to help his partner up, "they're everywhere."

The two turned away together and walked through the front of the building and out onto the street.  Two squad cars were already pulled to the curb and a third screamed down the street toward them.

"He's all yours," Tommy told the first officer he saw.  "We'll see you back at the station."

"But..." the words died on the young officer's lips.  He caught a glimpse of the look in Tommy's eyes, saw it mirrored in Mac's, and he didn't say another word.  With a short nod and a spin that was as much to escape Tommy's eyes as to get back to work, he was headed for the studio door.

"Let's get the fuck out of here, Mac," Tommy said, trudging wearily across the street toward their car, "let's just get the fuck out."

The darkness swallowed them, and he could see no end.