The Deep Dark Descending Read online

  ALSO BY ALLEN ESKENS

  The Life We Bury

  The Guise of Another

  The Heavens May Fall

  Published 2017 by Seventh Street Books®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  The Deep Dark Descending. Copyright © 2017 by Allen Eskens. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Cover image © Maarten Wouters / Getty Images

  Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Eskens, Allen, 1963- author.

  Title: The deep dark descending / by Allen Eskens.

  Description: Amherst, NY : Seventh Street Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017019514 (print) | LCCN 2017023729 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883567 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883550 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3605.S49 (ebook) | LCC PS3605.S49 D44 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019514

  Printed in the United States of America

  To all the teachers I’ve had who have led me (and sometimes pushed me) in the right direction. Thank you.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Up North

  I raise the ax handle for the third blow and my arm disobeys me, stiffening above my head, my hand tangled in knots of shouldn’ts and shoulds and all those second thoughts that I swore wouldn’t stop me. My chest burns to take in oxygen. My body trembles with a crystalline rage, and my mind screams orders to my mutinous hand. For Christ’s sake, get it over with. This is what you came here for. Kill him!

  But the ax handle doesn’t move.

  A surge of emotion boils up from somewhere deep inside of me, building to such a violent pitch that I can’t hold it in, and I let loose a howl that fills the spaces between the trees and whips through the forest like an artic wind swirling skyward until it fades into nothingness.

  And still the ax handle doesn’t move.

  Why can’t I kill this man?

  He’s on his back, unconscious, his eyes rolled up behind the slits of his eyelids. His arms are bent at the elbows, hands sticking up in the air. His fingers curl into sharp hooks, as if clawing at something that’s not there. Maybe in the dark corners of his senseless brain he’s still fighting with me—grabbing for my throat or plunging his fish knife into my ribs. But the fight is over; he’ll realize that soon enough.

  My chest is on fire, the frozen air scraping my lungs with white-hot bristles. Exhaustion kicks at my knees until I tilt back, planting my butt in the snow, the ax handle sinking to rest at my side. It’s maybe five degrees out here, but I’m burning up under my coat. I pull the zipper down to expose myself to the winter air, and it chills the sweat that clings to my flannel shirt. I lift my collar to cover my mouth and breathe through the material, letting the dampness of my exhale moisten the cloth, smoothing down the serrated edge of my inhales.

  The man just beyond my feet should be dead, but that last strike didn’t land true. Excuses line up on my tongue, bitter seeds waiting to be spit to the ground. I was tired from the chase, and I was off balance when I hit him. I started the swing of my ax handle ready to send a hanging slider into the upper deck, my aim zeroed in on that soft plate beside his left eye. But he lunged at me with a fishing knife. Dodging the blade caused me to tilt enough that it changed my swing from a death blow to a knockout. Such is the difference an inch can make.

  The man’s head twitches, and his right hand jerks and falls to his side—a mean dog having a bad dream. A tiny trail of blood trickles from beneath his stocking cap. It follows a path down the side of his head to where it has been dripping off his left ear, creating a red blossom in the snow. I watch his torso slowly rise and fall. He breathes, and that irks me. I should have killed him in the heat of the fight; that’s how it was supposed to happen—no contemplation, just action and reaction. He had a knife. I had a headless ax handle. A club verses a blade, that’s about as fair as it gets, isn’t it?

  Fair. Why do I care about fair? If things were reversed and I was the one scratching at the dead air, he would not hesitate to kill me. He doesn’t deserve the courtesy of fairness. Yet I remain ensnared by childhood notions of right and wrong, impressions as thin as tissue, but layered so thick in my memory that they have become walls of stone. I am somehow tethered to the black-and-white world of my youth as I struggle to pull myself toward a shadow of gray. I’m not that boy anymore.

  I try to clear the tar from my thoughts. One more hit will put him to rest. One more swing of the ax handle is all I need. My fingers tighten around my weapon.

  It’s then that I hear the whisper of her words, faint, mixing with the breeze that’s whistling through the nettle. She’s speaking with that same tsk of disappointment that she sometimes used when I was a child. Is this what you’ve become, Max Rupert? Nancy asks. Is this who you are?

  I loosen my grip on the ax handle. I hadn’t thought of Nancy in years, and now when I need her least, the goblins of my subconscious find it necessary to summon her memory from the dust. I don’t want her interference. Not today. I squeeze my eyes shut and her ghost disappears.

  The man starts to move, rolling like some newborn larva, blind to the world but coming to understand that something has gone terribly wrong. I had hit the man hard—twice—but not hard enough, because he didn’t die. The gurgle of each exhale lifts up from the back of his throat like a snore. He’ll be waking soon.

  I climb to my feet and square up like
I’m getting ready to split a log. This time, it’s not a random whisper of Nancy’s voice in the breeze that stops me. It’s a memory that took a full day to create, but comes back to me now in a starburst so brief that I can barely blink before it’s gone. I was in fifth grade and had just left the cafeteria on my way to recess, racing at a pretty good clip. As I neared the entrance to the playground, a couple of sixth-grade boys came around the corner, walking toward me. I didn’t know either one of them, but I would learn later that the bigger of the two was a kid named Hank Bellows.

  As we passed each other, Hank threw his shoulder into me, sending me careening into a wall. I bounced off the brick and went sprawling across the asphalt, the ground chewing up a good chunk of skin on my forearm. I looked up to see both boys laughing as they continued their walk to the cafeteria.

  When my father heard the explanation for my wound, he lit into me like it had somehow been my fault, as if my weakness brought this on. “You can’t let that stand,” he said. I could smell the beer in his words. “It don’t matter that he’s a sixth grader or that he’s bigger than you. You have to call him on what he did. He’ll never respect you as a man if you don’t stand up for yourself. It’s up to you, and no one else, to make this right. That’s what a man does—he makes it right. You want to be a man, don’t you?”

  I didn’t need his encouragement. I already had plans for Hank.

  But later, after my dad fell asleep watching TV, Nancy came to my room, carrying a first-aid kit. She had moved into our house when I was five and, as near as I could tell at the time, she was my dad’s girlfriend. Her touch was gentle and her words soft. She asked me to go through the incident again as she washed dried blood from the wound. I told her what had happened from beginning to end.

  “You’re pretty mad at Hank, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to kick his—” I stopped myself because Nancy didn’t like profanity, even though profanity seemed to be half of my dad’s daily vocabulary.

  “Being mad doesn’t feel good, does it?” She lifted a dollop of salve to spread on the abrasion. I braced for the sting, but it never came. “All that anger you have inside you?”

  I gave a shrug.

  “I’ve been angry like that before. For me it felt like I had a stone pressing down on my chest. Can you feel that?”

  I don’t remember if I could feel a stone, exactly, but I could feel something, so I nodded.

  “There’s an old saying that a person who goes looking for revenge should dig two graves. Have you ever heard that before?”

  I shook my head no.

  “It means that you’re not solving the problem by getting revenge. You’re only making it worse. You’re making it just as bad for yourself as for the other person. You see what I’m saying?”

  As she spoke, I relived getting thrown into that wall and I could feel the anger crawling up my throat. My eyes began to tear up, and I wanted Nancy out of my room. I didn’t want her to see me cry. She didn’t say anything more as she cut and taped gauze to my arm. I know now that she was letting her words sink in.

  When she’d finished, she returned her supplies to the kit. Then she turned to me and said, “Tomorrow, when you go to school, you do what you think is right. But don’t do it because your father told you to do it or because I told you not to. You’re the one who has to live with what you do.”

  The man at my feet moans again and I’m pulled out of my thoughts, Nancy’s words fading into silence. I curse myself for letting that memory find daylight. I’m not ten years old, and this isn’t about a skinned-up arm. It’s about much more.

  But what if he doesn’t understand? What if the man at my feet doesn’t know which of his many sins has brought him here? What if I kill him and he doesn’t understand why? He needs to know why. Her name must be his last thought—its echo should be the last sound he hears before darkness chokes him.

  Snow, thin like fire ash, is falling on the man’s face, pulling him back to consciousness. I tap my leg with the ax handle. It would be foolish to let him wake up to continue our fight. But I’m not ready to kill him yet. I know that now. I knew it back when I couldn’t strike that third and final blow, only I didn’t understand it then. I need something from him—something more than just his death. I need to hear him admit that he killed my wife.

  CHAPTER 2

  Minneapolis—Three Days Ago

  It was only three days ago that I first listened to the two men as they planned my wife’s murder. Their conversation, a slow, drawling phone call that bounced off of satellite towers four and a half years earlier, had been preserved on a compact disc—insurance against faithless co-conspirators was my guess. Now that disc spun inside my laptop, their small words filling my house, their cold, rusty voices ripping into me, gutting me, leaving me hollow and weak. These were the men who killed my wife.

  When the recording ended, my house fell silent except for the sound of my own breath billowing through my nostrils in short bursts. My mouth watered as though I were going to throw up. Maybe I was going to throw up. Chaotic thoughts broke against my skull, words careening off bone and leaving behind a twisted muddle. These two men were talking about Jenni. They were discussing how they were going to end her life, and they were doing it with the nonchalance reserved for weather chitchat or reading a lunch menu.

  I stood up from the couch because my legs demanded it. A sudden burst of energy sent me walking in circles around my living room. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to kick and tear and destroy things. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, anything to purge the anguish from my body. I raised my hand to punch the wall, but stopped short, grabbing my head instead, my hands squeezing into my temples. I clenched my teeth and swallowed the explosion that fought to get out. I pressed everything inward, holding fast to a rage more pure and more acrid than anything I have ever before tasted. I kept it all in. The time would come for that to be unleashed, but not yet.

  When I opened my eyes, I was myself again, calm, steady, thinking, breathing. I stepped to my front door and opened it a crack to let in some cold air. Eighteen degrees below zero. Not unusual for Minneapolis on December 31st, but this winter seemed colder than normal. I breathed in, filling my lungs with what felt like raw ice, and then slowly exhaled. Outside, the afternoon sun had already started its slide toward the horizon. Evening came so early this time of year.

  I had no plans for that night. Even before Jenni died—before she was murdered—we rarely went out on New Year’s Eve. We had refined our tradition to a simple evening of popcorn, old movies, and a kiss at midnight. That was my idea, or my fault, depending on who you asked. Jenni, the free spirit, loved to dance and dress up and enjoy a well-prepared meal at a nice restaurant. She was the one who found significance in the small squares on the calendar. I once told her that I didn’t see the need to celebrate the arbitrary end of another rotation around the sun. On this score, she ignored me completely, and we celebrated birthdays and anniversaries and a plethora of lesser occasions.

  After Jenni’s death, those occasions, even the lesser ones, remained my connection to her. I found her thread woven through almost every part of my existence, a tapestry once vibrant and alive now in danger of fading away. But it didn’t fade. I wouldn’t let it. Every turn of the page brought some new reason to remember her: our first date, the day I told her I loved her, the day I proposed, birthdays, holidays, the day she died.

  I didn’t watch old movies that first New Year’s Eve without her. The wound—a mere five months old—was still too fresh to relive such a tradition alone. Instead, I drank scotch until I threw up on myself. I did a lot of drinking that year—not the steady drip of sneaking shots into my coffee cup. No. My drinking came in torrents—binge sessions that amplified the tiniest memory into a mind-numbing cacophony. I could go from breaking the seal to bed spins in less time than it took to play one of her favorite CDs.

  I probably would have continued down that path had it not been for the scene I
’d made at the cemetery on the first anniversary of her death. It was whiskey that night, enough that I passed out hugging the grass above Jenni’s grave. Security guards had kicked me out of the cemetery when it closed earlier, but I wasn’t done talking to my dead wife, and I still had half a pint of Jim Beam. I retain a vague recollection of climbing back over the wrought-iron fence, relying more on luck than skill to keep from impaling myself on the railhead spikes that surrounded the cemetery.

  I was found there by my brother, Alexander, and a friend by the name of Boady Sanden—at least he’d been a friend back then. They managed to drag me out through a side gate, with no security guard being the wiser. That night had become a solemn memory, but that memory—that friendship with Boady—went up in flames, the way tinder is supposed to, I guess. We were a pairing that should never have been, a homicide detective and a defense attorney. Other cops told me that it was unnatural. I probably should have listened.

  As I contemplated the start of another year without Jenni—my fifth now—I held no thought of Boady Sanden. I had planned to spend that New Year’s Eve sitting alone in a house that hadn’t changed its mood since the day she died, watching black-and-white movies until sleep took me. That plan fell away with a ringing of a door bell. I wasn’t expecting company; and when I answered the door, I saw Boady Sanden standing before me, his back braced against the cut of the frigid wind. It was all I could do not to punch him in the face.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  Images of our friendship passed between us like a train speeding by. There had been some good times. But then I remembered the day our friendship ended.

  Two months ago, I’d been testifying in a case for which I was the lead investigator and Boady the defense attorney. It wasn’t our first time playing that game, although it had been several years since I had to face one of his tough cross-examinations. But that day, Sanden blindsided me. He brought out a reprimand I’d received for digging into my wife’s death, an act forbidden of a detective like myself. Sanden, my friend, accused me of playing loose with my investigation, of worrying more about Jenni’s death than about his client’s case. He paraded that reprimand in front of the jury, telling them that I had lost my mind from grief and had not done a proper job.