The Black Book

Little Black Book

Little Black Book

The place stank of stale beer, cigarettes—and regret. The dim lighting, masked the dated saloon fixtures and clientele from deeper scrutiny equally. Without exception, the figures leaning over their drinks were solitary, alone with their thoughts, or their guilt. People didn’t come to a place like this for pleasant conversation, or for the ambiance. There was no juke box to liven the evening. The only sound, the muffled clank of filled glasses on the scarred wooden bar top, or the rattle of whiskey bottles being returned to the shelf broke the quiet. A silent hockey game played itself on the television mounted above the cash register at the end of the bar. The bartender knew how to mind his own business, and so did everyone else. This place was the place you go at the end of a chapter in your book of life, or at the beginning of the next one. It was a place to contemplate what went wrong.

Looking down the long bar from my stool at the far end, I knew every single one of them. I didn’t know them personally or the names they went by, but I knew them, I knew who they were. These were my kind of people, or had been. These were the reprobates of society, petty criminals, wife beaters, and socially reprehensible characters who populated the back streets of our city. They were not homeless bums, or vagrants, they had money in their pockets. How the money got in their pocket was nobody’s business but their own. These were the people who feared the darkness.

I had been one of them for a long time. Like them, I had thought that there was nothing wrong with the lifestyle, that good or evil depended on which end of the shit stick you had grabbed. I had believed that in life, you got what you got, and if this is what you got, then so be it. But the lifestyle was an unforgiving one, and sooner or later they would all succumb. Sooner or later, the devil got his due and they all knew it. I had walked into the darkness, had met it face to face. The darkness knew my name.

There had come a time when the light went on in my head. I had seen the handwriting on the wall and had hopefully begun to change my future. I no longer walked the back streets in the dark of night and the money in my pocket now came from a legitimate paycheck, because she had helped me to see a better way. But she, like most things in my life was no more.

Places like this were still a comfort to me. This stool at the end of this bar with the wall behind me had been my seat, earned by contest, and jealously guarded. No one fucked with me on this stool, because I had fucked with each and every one of them at one time or another. They knew me well even though I was rarely seen here anymore. They knew my face and they knew not to fuck with me. They knew that I wasn’t here for the conversation either. The beer was cold, it was warmer in here than out on the street and I had no place else to go tonight.

I had been here long enough to fill my bladder and after scraping my change off the bar I pushed back and stepped to the toilet at the end of the hallway. This wasn’t the kind of place that featured lemon-scented ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ restrooms. The ‘restroom’ was a toilet, in a room with a small sink stand, a mop bucket and a musty wet mop as an air freshener. The toilet had plenty of grime and shit on it and in it, but when I flushed, it all went down not up. Turning toward the sink stand, I kicked something from down next to the base of the toilet and it slid out into the dim light of the bare overhead bulb. A small black book, that someone had lost or left behind, probably while his pants were down while ‘dropping a deuce’. Stooping I picked it up, it looked like the kind of little book that bookies carry to keep track of their bets. I pocketed it and headed back out into the bar. With a look to the bartender, I made my way through and toward the front door.

Stepping out onto the street and down the block, I unlocked my car and climbed in. Inside with the overhead light on I opened the little book, thinking there was bound to be a ‘Finder’s fee’ for returning a bookies’ client list. Inside there were no long lists of numbers, or names. No race numbers at Washington Park. Inside was something entirely different.

In growing amazement, I flipped back and forth from page to page. Inside in neat, careful Catholic-school penmanship, were pages of descriptive prose. A date, a name and a chapter devoted to the rape and torture of a woman or girl in graphic detail. As I read, I had first suspected it to be fantasy fiction, but with each entry it became increasingly obvious that it was fact not fiction. It was a documentary of sickness written by a serial psychopath.

With each entry, the acts seemed to become ever more heinous, and near the back of this little black notebook, the last victim had not survived. The last entry’s date had been yesterday. Her name had been Grace. Grace had been eleven-years-old.

Closing the book, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the headrest. I hated this. I hated this feeling; this knowledge that things like this continued to fall into my lap. I hated that I had no choice. I hated that action was necessary and that I was compelled to supply it. Most of all I hated that I was one of them, one of the scum, perhaps not as much anymore, but once I had been one of them—the takers of souls.

Now I had become a worse thing; if that was even possible. I did not indulge in the self-righteous thinking of right or wrong, but I knew a heinous act when I saw it. I knew that there was no need to balance the scale, both in justice and atonement. I knew that I had a lot to apologize for but I didn’t need any of that to justify what needed to be done today. Opening the car door, I put one boot on the ground, knowing what was to come next, angry at the circumstance and angry at the friend that I was about to make.

Once back in the bar, the bartender acknowledged my return with the slightest lift of his chin, and set a fresh beer glass down at my place. I signaled him to approach with a crook of my finger. When he leaned an elbow on the bar across from me, I showed him the book.

“Found this on the floor back in the shitter. Best see if it belongs to anybody.” Before he take it from me, I pulled it back and made eye contact with him. “But if anybody wants it, don’t let ‘em have it, bring it back to me.”

I handed him a twenty.

He didn’t reply, just took the book and walked along the bar. Showing it to each patron, but without explanation. The third person, looked surprised and slapped his back pocket, then looked thunderstruck. He reached for it immediately, but the bartender pulled it back and kept walking. Once he’d done the circuit, he brought the book back and set it in front of me. He raised one eyebrow and cocked his head back toward the surprised fellow whose eyes had never left him.

“Is there gonna be trouble Casey?”

“Nope, just want to make sure its goin’ to the right guy.”

“If there’s trouble, you take your business outside. Got it?”

“No trouble Jake.”

The fellow down the bar had started to develop a twitch, and finally couldn’t contain it anymore. With a violent push, he left his stool and hurried back to where I was just getting interested in my fresh beer.

“Hey you found my book! Can I have it.”

“There oughta be a finder’s fee.”

“A finder’s fee? Uh, yeah, sure. Like what?”

“I’m gonna need another beer pretty quick, let’s start with that.”

“Great, sure. How ‘bout my book?”

“Pull up a seat, nobody sits back here usually, kind a lonesome.”

“Uh okay,” He looked around my little corner of heaven, “you sure?”

“Pull up a seat, and we’ll talk about that book, what’dya say.”

“The book, what about the book.”

“I looked at some of the stuff in there.”

He was a good-sized guy, big shoulders with a couple of days growth of beard going, but I watched the color drain out of his face just the same.

“You read some of it?”

“Yeah, you know. I was sittin’ on the pot back there, so I flipped through a few pages. I was impressed, gotta say, I’m a big fan,” I did a half turn on the bar stool and faced him, “if half that stuff is true man, you’re a fuckin’ artist.”

“Uh an artist? What do you mean?”

“Well, I didn’t get to read a lot, but what I read…Wow…those bitches…you know...like they got what they deserved it looked like. And you were so creative! I’m just saying, I’m impressed.”

“Yeah? You mean that?”

“Yeah, I do. Say, how about that beer? Oh, and a shot too? That should be included, after all, you wouldn’t want to lose a book like that, right?”

“Yeah sure.” He signaled the bartender for another round for both of us. “You think I’m an artist?”

“I really do. So, tell me more, I gotta know, how’d you get ‘em? What’dya do with ‘em when you’re finished? You know, I’m getting a little excited just thinkin’ about it.” I winked at him, “If you know what I mean.”

“It’s not easy you know. You gotta plan, you gotta watch ‘em.” The bartender brought our new drinks and he waited until he moved back down the bar before continuing. Scooting closer on the edge of his seat and warming up to his audience of one. “Yeah, like you gotta learn their habits and stuff. You can’t just let yourself get careless. It’s hard, takes a lotta plannin’ ya know. You gotta really get to know ‘em. Doesn’t just happen overnight.”

“I bet, geez, the suspense must be murder.”

“Murder? What do you mean by that?”

“No, it’s just a figure of speech. I just mean it must be hard to wait until the time is just right. How do you do it, wait I mean?”

“Oh, it is hard,” He took a drink from his new beer, and I threw back the shot. I signalled the bartender to keep them coming. “You gotta have a lot of self-control, you gotta be in charge. Be the boss. The more you watch ‘em, the more you learn what bitches they are. You learn to hate them more every day.”

He was still talking when the bartender gave last call.

By now he was in no shape to drive anymore after all and I was his new best friend. Back out on the street, I offered him a ride home. I hinted, and he insisted that we make a slight detour so he could show me where he had left Grace. It was a pleasant spot, under a viaduct that spanned a drainage ditch filled with trash and litter, close enough to the river so you could smell it at the back of your throat.

The police won’t find him, him—or his little black book. I put him in the ground. The book was the last thing I threw into the hole with him before I filled the dirt back in. Afterward, I left little Grace where the authorities would find her in the morning.

He was surprised when I sent him to hell. I’ll join him there one day.