Monday, July 25, 2005

Levi

slab
shutter speed
ankle holster
fatigued
tempest



Levi adjusted his ankle holster, stood up from the bed and buckled his belt. He looked for a moment at the fatigued holes behind the one the buckle tongue was in now. The belt was a timeline. Levi could trace his history on the force - all the stress, stakeout food, alcohol - he figured he gained about a belt hole every two years. Six of them were looking pretty wallowed out and he was just about to the end of the belt. That wasn't all he was near the end of. It was time to give it up. He'd seen three partners on the slab and watched two others retire. Time was up, dammit. Shift's over. Yeah, he'd made detective, but he was still tired. He gave himself one last check in the mirror, smoothed out his beard and headed to the living room. There, he did a quick inventory of his bag - film, camera, glassine bags, markers, print kit, evidence markers, test-tubes, pen, graph paper, toluene, tweezers, luminol, superglue, latex gloves. Good to go.

Besides – this business of late was just more than he could handle - at least a regular dose of it. There had always been outbreaks of violent crime. That was the nature of the beast. Levi had given this much thought over the years and had come to the conclusion that the outbreaks came and went according to a broad, complex, incomprehensible pattern. It was chaos theory. Levi didn't believe you had to be a super-cerebral mathmatician to figure that out. Crime came and went like an angry human weather system. "A low pressure system will be moving through the metro area today. We can expect flaring tempers, a number of brutal murders and the occasional violent sex crime." But this thing lately, this was no tempest, this was the motherfucker of all storms. This was that perfect storm thing - the confluence of events. This was mass anger on a ten-year high, sexual tension setting records, planets aligned, weapon purchases up, bullet sales off the charts and - and this was the kicker - ultra, conservative religious fervor thrown in for good measure. The calls were like nothing he'd ever seen - like a friggin' George Romero movie. Beheaded children with symbols carved into their flesh, household pets hung up like strange fruit in neighborhood trees, churches, mosques and temples desecrated. And the goofy thing was no particular denomination was spared. Everybody got to share in the misery. Shared misery - that was the deal. He'd just finished that thought when, as if to confirm his thinking, the phone rang. The phone was never good. His ex quit calling years ago. His son was in a halfway house somewhere in Fresno and never called, and his daughter, well, she wasn't going to call again in this lifetime, that was for sure. So when the phone rang, it was no surprise to discover some more shared misery at the other end.

Levi walked into the blood-spattered doorway and took a good look at the lighting inside - mostly incandescent, but lots of it. He took out his Pentax K-1000, double checked his film speed - 400, set the shutter speed at 60 fps and proceeded to do the job.

One more time.

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