INTEROFFICE MEMORANDUM
SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT
TO: MAJOR CRIMES DIV/ HOMICIDE
FROM: Lt. Phillip Walker
DATE: December 2, 1992
SUBJECT: Catherine Tramell / Det. Nick Curran/ Johnny Boz (dec.)/ Shooter / Basic Instinct
As you know, this department has spent considerable man-hours and budget on the investigation of one Catherine Tramell, a.k.a. “Catherine Woolf,” as the primary suspect in the homicide of singer/ club owner John “Johnny” Boz on March 18, 1991–to little avail. The investigation was led by Detective Nick Curran until he was placed on administrative leave. It remains cold to this day.
As you likely know, Ms. Tramell, in addition to being a millionaire heiress of leisure, successfully moonlit as a popular crime novelist under the pen name “Catherine Woolf.” It must be noted here that each of her novels bear striking similarities to crimes that were at least tangentially connected to Ms. Tramell’s personal life. As such, it is of little surprise that her most recent novel, Shooter, reads as a thinly-veiled version of the Boz case, especially as it pertains to Det. Curran (a.k.a. the character “Shooter” in the novel). If you haven’t read the book, you’ve likely seen the film based upon it that Hollywood churned out earlier this year, Basic Instinct—about which I will keep my opinions to myself, given how much that film’s S.F.-based production “benefited” our taxpayers, and especially our mayor. Needless to say, I won’t be seeing it again.
With its release, I forced myself to finally read Shooter in the hopes of finding some sort of closure, but after the first few chapters, I simply haven’t the stomach to live this nightmare again, especially when it’s written out as such pulpy and salacious airport-noir garbage as Ms. Tramell’s novel. I’ve Xeroxed various excerpts that I managed to get through and which were not included in the film–they may yet have pertinence to this case. I am including them in the Boz/Tramell/Curran file for future investigators, should the need arise. Though I suspect, with some sadness, that this one will remain cold.
Both Catherine Tramell and Detective Nick Curran remain missing since their simultaneous disappearances in April of 1991 following a flurry of additional homicides surrounding this case. It’s possible both are still alive somewhere; that said, the bloody bed sheets found in Det. Curran’s apartment have led this old investigator to suspect foul play.
Or, at the very least, a rougher kind of play than most of us are used to.
–Lt. P. Walker, Major Crimes Div./Homicide, 12/02/92
EXCERPT #1:
Waves of light rolling over leather and chrome, Technicolor spirals, bodies in all directions.
Shooter steps out of the wombmurk black of the movie theater and into the bright dark of the San Francisco night. Music slaps asphalt from passing cars, hip couples in leather push uphill on sidewalks hieroglyphed with cracks and graffiti, neon storefronts burn against the night.
And the night, it seethes. Seethes like her. A hum and thrum Shooter feels throbbing in time to his already-jacked pulse, feels it like a bullet ricocheting inside his fillings, feels it like a warm hand sliding under his sweater, against his tingling stomach, past his belt, beneath his briefs and squeezing his balls hot and tight, just like Ka—
“Katrine,” Shooter says in something south of aloud but north of a whisper, announcing to the night and confirming to his own body the livewire force that seems to control both with her every whim.
Katrine.
He’d been here tonight, at this theater, watching this film, because she’d told him to.
“Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two, Shooter,” she’d whispered the night before, standing behind him in the shower, on her toes and craning her chin up to his shoulder, her wet lips tattooing each word against the side of his earlobe as her soapy fingers reached even deeper into him than the night was doing now.
“Vertigo,” she’d whispered, licking each syllable, and pressed inside him.
~
Shooter had stepped into the theater from a late afternoon downpour just two hours earlier. A brutal torrent, the storm had collapsed a brilliantly sunny day into the same strange aquarium-blue of the pixelated sapphire nights featured in cable erotica, the kind Shooter jerked off to when he needed what little sleep his work and obsessions allowed. He shook the rain off onto the popcorn-gummed carpet of the lobby like a thoughtless dog, oblivious to the annoyed stares of his fellow matinee weather refugees. His wet bomber jacket flattened into a second skin against him, the sop of his clothes gripping tight to his hard body. Squeezing him.
Just like Katrine had been squeezing him, enveloping him, his job, his world, his whole fucking life, for the last two weeks. A woman he hadn’t known existed one day, and then the next—shit, he’d thought of her every waking moment since. No—not just his every waking moment. Hers was the face of his dreams, too. And the nightmares he wouldn’t admit to himself that he remembered.
She had a hold on him like no other woman ever had. Like a vise: unyielding, ever-pressuring, ever-tightening. Just like she fucked. Something requiring a level of strength beyond Shooter’s comprehension, yet to Katrine it seemed as easy as breathing. Not even a tic around the freezing blue oceans of her eyes, or a twitch of the smile that never seemed to touch them.
She had a hold on him, all right.
How else could he explain being at some thirtysomething Hitchcock movie on a Friday afternoon when there was an open murder case on the books? His case, the one he’d been working. Even if he had been castrated of his gun and badge, both of which were locked in one of his lieutenant’s desk drawers back at the Major Crimes Unit. Even if. Even still.
Shooter was a San Francisco cop.
More than that, Shooter was a homicide detective.
“Was,” being the operative word, seeing as how he’d been forced off duty yesterday, pending an investigation.
An investigation of my investigation, his thoughts hissed wryly.
How else could he explain being at a theater, then, with all that was happening, aside from the fact that Katrine had willed it?
Shooter chose a seat near the back of the run-down theater, a small, cloistered little junker that only played old movies and jutted from the outermost edge of the Mission District like a decaying tooth. He bought no snacks, no drinks, his knees pistoning up and down as he sat there, waiting for the show. He hummed with a dangerous, blunted energy, like a downed and sparking powerline you walk wide around to avoid.
“Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two, Shooter,” she’d said in the shower, calling him by the nickname he’d had on the force ever since—
No. He wasn’t going to let himself think of that now, no matter how often the acidy vomit of it all threatened to retch up into his brain and spatter his thoughts.
Katrine, he thought to himself, both as a calming mantra and obsessional north star.
She’d come to him the night before, when she heard he’d been indefinitely stripped of his gun, his badge, his power. Hell, she’d been waiting for him on his stoop as he rolled up in his growling black Mustang. Somehow she’d heard the confidential news before he’d even made it home.
Because Katrine seemed to know everything. Before anyone else did. Even what you wanted. Especially what you wanted.
And in a moment of vulnerability an hour later, their bodies sticky with cum and sweat and what was becoming an increasingly unsurprising amount of blood, tangled together in his fucksprung bed with its fucksoaked sheets, he’d confessed to feeling lost. The case, his job, his life, her, everything. Katrine had said nothing, a look of vague disgust settling behind her eyes, and instead contemplated the plumes of smoke she exhaled from their shared and lipstick-stained cigarette, fiberglass strands of smoke twisting up into the low cotton-candy cataract of nicotine that hung above them.
Then, when they stepped into his shower to wash off their sex and fuck yet again, she’d finally spoken—
“Vertigo.” Lost in memory, Shooter hadn’t clocked the teenage boy who waddled sullenly to the stage beneath a screen even more pockmarked than he was, reading notes about the film into a microphone for the thin crowd’s benefit.
Katrine telling him he’d like it. He should see it. He should do it for her. Like a good boy.
“It’s a movie about a disgraced San Francisco cop.” The boy, reading the cards in the robotic monotone of someone whose usual reading material’s copped from the local 7-11, becoming gluey and page-stuck after two or more perusals.
Katrine’s thoughts, pouring out of this boy’s mouth.
“Played by Jimmy Stewart, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson traffics in, and takes advantage of, the cultural perception of Stewart as a straight shooter—”
Shooter felt a cold, queasy surge that tore through his empty stomach. That word. That name. Like it was put on that card just for him to hear.
“—in order to subvert our expectations of who he truly is: a deeply disturbed former detective who becomes sexually obsessed with the dangerous blonde woman he’s been hired to follow and investigate. His investigation becomes an obsession—an obsession with this woman, an obsession with sex, an obsession with control, an obsession with obsession—but, most important of all, it is an obsession with death, an obsession with how sex connects to danger and danger connects to sex.”
Wet rivulets pooled under Shooter’s t-shirt at the small of his back, and if they were rain or sweat, he couldn’t tell. His eyes began making wide swaths over the heads in the audience. Looking for her. Was this a joke? A setup? Was this her doing? Was he losing his fucking mind? (Again, some under-voice cooed in his mind’s ear: losing your mind again, Shooter). His heartbeat quickened, a machine-gun tempo of blood pounding in his ears.
“In a way, you could call Vertigo the very first erotic thriller.”
Nothing. She wasn’t in the audience. No storm of fiery blonde curls, that golden hair of hers that burned as if haloed in sunlight, even in the dark.
“It set forth the path for an entirely new genre of film, taking the fusion of sex and death borne from films noir like Double Indemnity and attaching it to a disturbingly kinky Technicolor neo-noir, giving shape to the kinds of movies you now see on Cinemax late at night with names like Body Chemistry, Fatal Charm, Night Eyes, Naked Obsession. It’s a perverse and thrilling gathering of the themes of obsession, sex, danger, and death into one long spiraling scream, the bridge between the film noir and the erotic thriller, setting the stage for another film, one that hasn’t come yet, one that could be the apotheosis of both forms. The detective on the edge. The femme fatale with unbridled sexual power. The obsessive lust that binds them, that defines the secret snarling thing within some of us, the need to taste extremity, to feel alive with danger, to know how badly it burns, how deeply it cuts, even if—especially if—that knowledge destroys us. Sex that lets us taste death. Death that lets us taste sex. Vertigo is the beginning.”
Shooter tried to tell himself it was the stress. The case. The lack of sleep. The fact that he hadn’t had a drink in three months, and had only recently taken up smoking and fucking—his other two vices—once again. That his nervous system is shot and his brain acid-soaked in a cortisol bath of strain. He was being paranoid. He’d been pushed to the edge these last two weeks.
And then, in spite of everything, Shooter couldn’t help but smile madly at that last thought.
Because, yes, he felt himself teetering on the Edge, physically and mentally, hovering just over some exhausted, exhilarated abyss that could swallow him whole.
Because that was the only way Shooter felt alive.
The house lights dimmed. When the darkness came, Shooter let it take him.
~
Two hours later, the film is over, the storm has ended, and Shooter drifts into a different kind of darkness as the San Francisco night courses around him. This is the part of the story, in the kind of novels Katrine writes—lurid, pulpy things that froth with murder and fucking, driven by an uncannily astute psychological insight and an undeniable libidinal thrust of eroticism so powerful they feel almost deliriously pornographic, even dangerous—this is the part of the story where Katrine would write, “his mind is racing.”
Shooter’s mind is racing.
Why had she sent him here tonight, to this theater, to this film? What is she trying to say—that he’s like the detective in Vertigo, some sap lost in a whirlpool of obsession either sexual or romantic or both? That he can’t see the obvious plot that is spiraling around him? Or that maybe he refuses to see it? Maybe he even wants it?
Shooter needs to think. To sit and trace the arc of the last two weeks, see the shape and heft of it, from the bedridden dead body Jackson Pollock’d with blood and cum that began this story to the two bodies slicked with the same in his bed last night.
What Shooter needs is a drink.
Three months dry. Ever since that day, with the tourists.
He never even heard their screams. Just the lilting rain of shell casings on concrete, something like fatal wind chimes, and the unrelenting thudbeat of his own jackknifing pulse in his ears.
Yes, Shooter definitely needs a drink.
He needs one so badly that, at first, he can’t discern the memory of his heartbeat in his ears on that terrible day with the tourists from the very real and steady click-clack echoing on the sidewalk behind him in time with his own footfalls. But eventually—
Shooter slows his stride.
The clicks and the clacks slow with him.
Shooter paces his breathing. Same as when he handles his gun. Same as when he fucks. No matter the chaos beginning to wardrum within him, Shooter tells himself to keep his breathing cool. Shooter is not a smart man, though he doesn’t know that. But Shooter is cunning. So Shooter listens.
He picks up his pace again.
The space between the clicks and the clacks disappears, the noises almost on top of each other to keep pace with his stride.
Shooter stops abruptly. The click-clacks disappear, swallowed by the murmur of street noise, the people, the motors, the music.
His mouth twists into the crude lip-twisted sneer that’s as close as he ever comes to smiling.
Shooter is being followed.
He thinks about how only one person knew where he’d be tonight. Didn’t just know, but told him to be here.
He thinks—and not for the first time that week, that day, or that hour—about how, before he was suspended, he was investigating Katrine for the most brutal, wantonly vicious murder he’d seen in his eight years as a detective. How, when they met, he immediately suspected she was capable of anything. And how, when he fell in love with her, he was sure of it.
Shooter’s heart beats at a tempo it hasn’t reached since he stood over those tourist’s bodies, cocaine arcing through his synapses.
Feel the Edge:
Every nerve in his body hums in thrall with the surging world around him. He can see every zigzagged crack in the concrete sidewalk, suss out every song screaming out of every car window. The colors of the storefront lights shine napalm-bright in his wide eyes. The night, it tastes so much better.
The sky burns above him like black neon.
Shooter feels his cock begin to throb, just as it always does when he’s in danger, growing thick and hard and pressing down his thigh against the tightness of his jeans. He stops thinking of Vertigo. He stops thinking of his suspension. He doesn’t even think about how this heightened, death-driven exaltation—his skin charged with roiling electrical currents, his atoms feeling like once-dead stars now igniting in his body all at once—is exactly how he feels between Katrine’s legs, the feral power of her thighs gripped tight around his hips, her calves driving him deeper inside her body as they lick and suck and bite each others’ lips with the hungry, desperate abandon of the goddamned.
Shooter is never more alive than when he feels like this, pressed against the serration of what feeds him, and of what could destroy him.
Stopped on the sidewalk, next to a Buick parked in the red and sheened with rainwater, Shooter drops to one knee as if to re-lace his boots. He eyes the gleaming chrome of the car’s wraparound bumper.
In it, he sees the zoo of his face reflected—the owl eyes, the reptilian features, all hooded by his slicked-back hair.
He sees the nightgoers behind him, breaking and passing around him like a river.
And then:
A figure in white. Unmoving. Tall. A storm of blonde—
The figure blurs, and Shooter spins on his heels. If he’d had a gun, it’d already be drawn and pointed into the crowd. Because Shooter never learns.
He stands.
The figure in white is gone.
Shooter pushes his way back towards the theater, craning to look over passersby, his erection aching against his leg, driving him to find some kind of satisfaction, to catch his prey, to revel in the hunt.
But there’s nothing. Not even a click, not even a clack.
Then Shooter remembers driving Katrine home that first day, the day of her interrogation at headquarters. How it had been raining that day, too. How she’d thanked him for the ride, then leapt from his Mustang onto her driveway without a sound in the rain.
She’d taken off her shoes, and ran in total silence.
Shooter’s balls cramp and ache. His guts begin to twist. The world dims, becomes ugly again, an insult compared to what he knows it can be when his arousal is total.
Shooter deals with the problem the best way he knows how.
Shooter turns and walks to his local cop bar, The Blue Room.
EXCERPT #2:
Floes of geometric shapes, hazed and hued a syrupy mix of brown and orange, interlock and drift. Within their intersecting lines is a kind of glow, a rippling of movement. Stare deep enough into that dark, glassy amber and a bedroom reveals itself, aglow with the same mahoganied aura. In the center, a bed; on the bed, two bodies. A well-built older man lies wristbound to the headboard, a white silk scarf crisscrossing through the ornate wrought-iron, holding his hands upward like a supplicant reaching for his god. That god straddles the man, bucking her hips as she cockrides him to a feral ecstasy that renders her a bronzed blonde blur of striating muscle, burning yellow hair, and savagely guttural animal moans. She leans back, her hands braced by his ankles and digging into the sheets while she thrusts her hips forward, working him, fucking him deep into the bed and even deeper into a kind of carnality few dare touch. She then flings her body forward as she orgasms hard, and with her every ragged breath she drives the phallic steel of an icepick into his face, his neck, his chest, gouging his body over and over, an ejaculation of blood that spatters the bed, her body, the dark unknown void of her face.
Shooter stares into his tumbler of Jack Daniels, watching the ice spiral around the little black straw he stabs down into the drink, all as he thinks about the brutal murder of rock star Jackie Benz. Thinks about the homicide case that, up until yesterday, had been his. The case whose only suspect has been one Katrine Trevor. Or Katrine Fox, the pen name under which she wrote her smutty airport fiction for hard-up housewives, lonely men, and degenerate dirtbags.
Shooter downs the Double Blackjack on the rocks and orders another, bringing his tally up to three for the night. A nice, respectable number, something that would previously have given him a low-ebb buzz at best. But Shooter hasn’t had a drop of booze in three months, his longest period of sobriety since college, and his tolerance is shot. His thoughts swim in a haphazard rush of imagery. Almost as soon as he’d sat at the bar to think, a Jackie Benz song, some rockabilly jangle from the late ’60s, had come screaming out of the jukebox and wrenched Shooter’s mind away from Vertigo and sidewalk stalkers toward the Benz case.
A kill like nothing he’d ever seen. He and his partner, Gary Marone, had taken the call; entering Benz’s baroque fuck-chamber, both of them breathed air stale and thick with the coppery taste of blood. This was bloodletting on a level that shook their usual safeguards of ironic detachment. Together they stood with about five other members of the Major Crimes Unit, almost like an audience. An audience watching something entirely new to them, some dark, dangerous, unsettlingly erotic iteration of what they thought they knew.
For some reason, Shooter remembers the teenager at the theater, the one sullenly reading to the crowd.
“…the bridge between the film noir and the erotic thriller, setting the stage for another film, one that hasn’t come yet, that could be the apotheosis of both forms…”
The thought shatters when the bartender, Harry, slaps another Double Blackjack down on the cratered bar of The Blue Room, a haven for old-school cops looking for some come-down at the end of their hard shifts of varied rights abuses and misuses. Broken capillaries bloom like fireworks across Harry’s nose, and above that nasal monument to a lifetime of drinking hangs two eyes staring at Shooter in bemused contempt, as if to say, “I knew you’d be back.”
Shooter takes a long, slow drink, feels the cold licorice taste envelop his tongue, cool his throat and then fireball deep into his stomach, all as it loosens his mind.
He’s backsliding. Falling into old, bad habits. And he has to admit, he more than kind of loves it. It’s almost as if, during these last three months—the sobriety, the no smoking, the celibacy—he was pulling undercover duty again. Except this time, the role he’d been playing was the version of himself the rest of the world wanted him to be.
Tonight, though, Shooter was being Shooter.
Because of Katrine.
She’s freed something within him, broken open some lock he’s kept on his worst, most dangerous impulses. He takes another long drink, nearly emptying the glass. He feels no shame in the drink, no embarrassment at pissing three months of sobriety down the drain.
Because of Katrine.
When he drops the tumbler to the bar, he stares into the ice cubes again, watching them melt inward on themselves against the bedrock of Jack. In that gold-tan murk he sees two bodies again. Another ornate bedroom, awash in rich, burning darkness and shadow. Two well-built bodies, a man and a woman, their skin slapping together in rhythm, the man driving himself deep inside her, both of them nearly screaming. Shooter and Katrine.
Ten days ago he’d followed her to the neon church of some gargantuan nightclub, tailing her, still just cop and suspect. She’d glowed that night, a single body standing out from a crowd of hundreds writhing to some driving, persistent beat. Shooter had followed her throughout the club like a hound, looking exactly like what he was—a cop trying to look like a normal person, decked in a ridiculous V-neck sweater and jeans, his pathetic perception of cool. Yet he’d felt no self-consciousness—the way she’d danced, drawing his body towards hers, melting the clubkids away just like his ice, making the whole fucking world melt away, leaving only the two of them. A physical acknowledgement of what he’d suspected from the moment they’d met and he’d tried to brace her for the killing—that they were alike, that burning within them both was some awful, negative-image flame that most of the rest of the world didn’t carry, the same terrible black neon glow that scarred the sky when he felt death creeping behind him outside the theater.
She’d taken him home that night, to her bed, and confirmed his suspicion. Not the suspicion that she was a killer, but that she was like him. Needing something deeper than sex, something that threatened madness. The way she’d clawed into his back, flaying off strips of skin like bloody wings, before rolling him over and mounting him, riding him like some thoughtless, bloodlusted beast, bringing her body down on him over and over until it hurt. And then—
She’d reached to the bedside table and unfurled a white silk scarf, a twisting ribbon of scar tissue fluttering above him, the same kind of scarf Shooter had seen at the Benz murder scene. He’d felt a roiling in his stomach, a cold shot of terror. But he let her tie him. He could have thrown her body across the room, but instead he went deathly still and let this suspected murderer tie him to the bed like the late, great Jackie Benz. She’d moved to take his control and he’d let her. He’d given up everything.
In that moment—Katrine arching her back and reaching her hands to his ankles—Shooter had realized the last thing Jackie-boy had ever seen was something just like this, possibly exactly this. Exactly her. And in that moment, just as his body slipped into the event horizon of the most powerful orgasm of his life, Shooter felt himself willingly giving everything he was to this woman, and to the black flower of her most unhinged desires, whatever they may be, whatever they could cost him.
Shooter thinks again of that ridiculous teenager. “…the secret snarling thing within some of us, the need to taste extremity, to feel alive with danger, to know how badly it burns, how deeply it cuts, even if—especially if—that knowledge destroys us…”
When Katrine had then flung herself forward, the only thing she took into her hands was Shooter’s face, kissing him wildly. He was still here, still alive. She’d tested him, watched to see how far he’d go, if he’d place himself upon the wheel where Jackie Benz had died. He’d done so willingly, and Shooter thinks she’d seen something in his eyes, something she felt within herself, too.
Shooter has to wonder what Katrine would have done had he faltered.
BAM! BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!
He jumps, instinctively grabbing at the gun no longer holstered to his right hip.
Harry looks up from the block of ice he’s just annihilated with an old icepick, smirking at Shooter’s reaction.
“That fall off the wagon a little bumpy, Shooter?”
Shooter refuses to give Harry the satisfaction of his rage, that familiar dull heat he’s missed in his sobriety, the comforting blanket that hides his fears and gives him the ability to easily half-cripple a man who makes the wrong kind of comment.
Instead, he smiles, tosses the origami’d meteor of a crumpled $20 bill at the bar, and goes to take a piss.
~
Shooter stands at the urinal, reads the magic marker poetry scrawled across the wall above him. Cops can be awfully maudlin when drunk, inking their darkest secrets and most hidden pains into the walls of their haven, confessions of bad men unable to articulate their sorrows into anything more eloquent than “Cindy Ramirez in Robbery Sux Cock But Will Tell Your WIFE” and “a dead witness a day keeps Internal Affairs away!”
Shooter sees something else, though—written in florid red marker, with a voluptuous, arcing script that feels both feminine and familiar, a phrase that his drunken eyes can’t quite comprehend but somehow almost recognize. As if he’s seen both—handwriting and phrase—somewhere else recently:
“quod me nutrit me destruit”
Shooter tries to sound at the words but can’t, his tongue gone flat and stupid with drink. But he knows he’s seen this before, and recently. And that handwriting: feminine, powerful, dangerous.
He shakes his cock and zips his jeans. His eyes drift down the wall as he moves to flush the urinal and—
Waves of gooseflesh shimmy throughout his skin, a paranoiac flutter just like he felt outside the theater. This sense that everything happening to him has been planned by some force larger and smarter and more powerful than himself. As if all of this were being written. As if it were all a test. As if he were being watched.
The same red ink, the same handwriting:
“What good’s a Shooter without his gun?”
This time, Shooter does what he didn’t do at the bar. What he didn’t do outside the theater.
Shooter runs.
EXCERPT #3
The night streaks past Shooter. Neon whorls and blurs. His Mustang’s normal growl is now a roar as he red-lines it away from the bar at speeds that stretch the outside world in bright burning tracer lines of the type he’d hallucinate back when he undercovered—way too hard—for Vice.
He ramps off a steep hill, his car making a suspension-flattening crunch against asphalt before the tires grip the road tight and Shooter fires forward. His blood chemistry is a subtropic storm of adrenaline, Jack Daniels, and paranoid terror.
“What good’s a Shooter without his gun?”
Something Katrine had said to him last night, groping him through his jeans, cheering him up after his suspension for a violent argument with a fellow officer.
Shooter’s always been volatile. She likes that in him.
Something she’d said, somehow scrawled in a bathroom Shooter just happened to find himself standing in.
Just like he’d heard her manner of speech in the theater kid’s notes on Vertigo.
A theater she knew he’d be at.
“No, no, no, no,” Shooter hissed, unsure of where he was going, just moving.
He tells himself he and Katrine are the same. They have to be.
Because if they aren’t—
~
“—he’s a patsy,” Katrine had moaned.
Five nights earlier, the monochrome inferno of Double Indemnity played late at night on the large television in the living room of Katrine’s beach house. Shooter sat motionless on Katrine’s couch, as she’d instructed him, his body naked and crosshatched with deep scratches from her fingernails. Katrine straddled his lap, her back to him, facing the TV. She rode him slow and deep, her skin rippling with movement and the hard, working muscle just beneath, pacing herself, edging him close to orgasm but never relenting and giving him release.
On the screen, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck sneered at each other across a similar living room of opulence, a dark cave slatted with burning bars of light from Venetian shutters.
“Nah,” Shooter whispers through his sneer-smile, aiming for humor but falling flat. “They…love…each…other.”
Katrine looked back over her shoulder, her eyes a glassy mix of coke, amusement, and something else, something Shooter couldn’t locate then but now in this flash of memory feels a little like…repugnance.
She turned her head back to the screen.
“Ugh,” she panted, her hips working a little faster, bringing him closer to the edge. He reached around, fingers gripping her wet stomach. “She loves him as much as she can, maybe.” She let out a long, low moan, her words and breathing both becoming jagged. “He’s still..just part of the game…to her. The murder. The fucking. The money. All of it. He thinks they’re just alike…but they’re not. This is the essence of noir. How the darkness shapes them…how they shape their darkness. They’re both rotten. But she’s worse.”
Shooter couldn’t help but run a hand up the hardness of her spine, her neck, his fingers splayed out within her fiery hair before grabbing a hungry fistfull. As if he needed more. To hear more.
Stanwyck’s icy blonde sat ensconced in a plush chair, her eyes burning as she started at MacMurray.
“He needs to feel the edge,” Katrine moaned. “But she needs to see it destroy him.”
Her movements quickened, her nails digging into Shooter’s knees.
“Why?” Shooter asked, less a word than an exhalation.
Her voice thick with lust and disgust, Katrine growled, “He comes when he’s against the edge. She comes when she survives it.”
In that moment her hips bucked, reaching a pace that shocked Shooter. He felt his orgasm building, hers too, crossing the point of no return.
On the screen, Stanwyck pulled out a gun. Katrine rocked against him, her hips swiveling at just the right moment, forcing Shooter to orgasm just as the patsy on screen felt his blonde lover’s bullet rip through his body, because they aren’t—
~
—the same, if they truly aren’t the same, then that means Katrine…
“No,” he seethes again. “No.”
He takes his foot off the gas, trying to slow his ride and his thoughts. He thinks of the headline from the San Francisco Chronicle. The one that should have relieved him of his existentially all-consuming guilt, but only righteously inflamed it instead.
Cop Cleared in Tourist Shooting. Grand Jury Says Shooting Accidental
He thinks of the day it was published, months ago, the day Internal Affairs found him not liable. How everyone in Major Crimes had cheered him. And how he felt he was going insane.
He thinks of how he felt the darkness inside him, just past the Edge, ready to finally swallow everything he was.
No. He can’t make such a mistake again. He can’t be that wrong twice.
Cop Cleared in Tourist Shooting. Grand Jury Says Shooting Accidental
He thinks of the worst day of his life, the one that earned him his nickname and a darkness so infinite it was beyond his understanding.
But not Katrine’s.
Cop Cleared in Tourist Shooting. Grand Jury Says Shooting Accidental
He thinks of the headline, part of a series of clippings about his career, his life, his monumental fuckup, spread across the ornate crystal coffee table in Katrine’s living room the day he came to brace her about the death of her rock star lover, Jackie Benz. He thinks about how his whole life was scissor-cut and splayed and ripped to pieces atop her table…like a project.
He thinks about three months ago, when—undercover and wired out of his fucking skull on cocaine—he’d unloaded his piece at a group of bangers set to ambush him for the stash he was carrying, and two stray rounds from his gun had dropped two tourists from Ohio.
He thinks about that, and he wonders when Katrine first learned of his case.
He thinks about how, on one of those newspaper clippings, just underneath a black and white photo of Shooter, a strange phrase was ink-penned in Katrine’s bold, arcing handwriting.
“quod me nutrit me destruit”
Light explodes inside Shooter’s Mustang as a car behind him flips on its brights and smashes into his rear bumper.
~
He’d been so shocked that day, there to pick up Katrine and haul her in for an interrogation regarding Benz’s death, to see the very worst of him—all his rottenness—spread upon her table.
Somehow, though, he’d been even more shocked by the sliver of her naked body he’d caught as she changed clothes in the next room before leaving with him. Even more shocked by how stunningly beautiful Katrine was as she stepped back into the living room, the doppelganger of a woman named Kim Novak in a movie called Vertigo, neither of which Shooter had ever seen before.
~
The car crunches against Shooter’s a second time, metal thrusting against metal. He screams, half-rage and half-terror. The other car thrusts against his again, ramming hard.
Shooter hits the gas, fishtailing his bumper free of the car behind him.
Half his world turns red—he doesn’t know it, but he’s gashed his forehead open wide on the steering wheel, tears of blood weeping into his right eye. Shooter always drives without a seatbelt.
He hard-rights into an alleyway, sparks flying into his open window as he scrapes past a metal dumpster. Light floods his world again as the other car whipsaws into the alleyway behind him, light illuminating everything.
~
He’d been just as shocked during her interrogation in a room full of testosterone-jacked men with their five-o’clock shadows and grey suits and sea-blue shirts, their guns clipped to their waists to cope with their dickswagger rage and dickshrivel fears. The way she’d taken everything they’d thrown at her, all their tricks, all their judgment at her way of life, at her arrogance, at her sexuality, at her brilliance. The way she’d listened, smiled, and then uncrossed her legs and flashed her naked pussy at them all, wordlessly. The power of that.
~
Shooter tries to turn left as he hurls out of the alley but the car behind him smashes against his bumper with a metallic moan, careening his car to the right. He’s forced to head back the way he’d been coming from.
“Come on!” he screams, his mouth a pinkish frenzy of bloody saliva.
The light fills his car again.
~
Days later, Shooter had sat in the same interrogation room, in the same chair as Katrine. It was the day of his suspension. He’d been brought in for questioning, and he came with the same attitude Katrine had. He’d felt so powerful, so connected to her by that point. He gave the same answers she did. The same attitude she did. Because, Shooter was so sure, they were exactly alike.
And yet they’d still taken his gun and badge.
Because she had something he didn’t.
~
Shooter knows this is the killer. It has to be. Who else could it be?
But who is the killer?
As he guns the motor, he remembers something Katrine had said.
“This is the essence of noir.”
The car rams him hard and deep. Shooter’s car woozily tilts towards the sky as it ramps onto a sidewalk, people screaming and diving out of the way, his car sawing off a row of parking meters before he’s able to drop back to the road.
Shooter doesn’t even notice how aroused he is. How hard and alive he is. Light washes across his face from the bright signs up ahead.
In the onrushing distance, he sees the theater he’d been in hours before, where he’d sat and listened to some punk read off a card handed to him.
“…the need to taste extremity, to feel alive with danger, to know how badly it burns, how deeply it cuts, even if—especially if—that knowledge destroys us…”
The car behind him thrusts into his again. And again. And again. Driving him forward. Driving him towards oblivion.
He thinks of Jimmy Stewart, dumbly staring at Kim Novak emerging from another room with a chilling, haunted regality.
Shooter’s car blasts through an intersection, nearly T-boning a Toyota as it tries to cross. Shooter and his hunter continue forward; the Toyota smashes into a newsstand.
He thinks of Barbara Stanwyck staring at the idiot man smirking at her in Venetian light.
The theater looms even closer now, the lettering upon its marquee almost visible.
He thinks of the Edge, and how badly his guilt makes him crave the danger that numbs all the pain. And of Katrine, the only woman who’s ever taken him to that Edge. He thinks of their first night together—how he assumed she wanted that too.
Shooter can see the marquee clearly now, the name of the evening show.
“He comes when he’s against the edge,” Katrine had moaned just before Shooter lived up to his name. “She comes when she survives it.”
The car behind him keeps thrusting forward, clipping Shooter’s Mustang from side to side, not letting him turn.
“Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two, Shooter.”
The theater is so close Shooter can see people running deep into the lobby, away from the glass doors.
“…it’s a perverse and thrilling gathering of the themes of obsession, sex, danger, and death into one long spiraling scream…”
In the days to come, after he checks himself out of the hospital against medical advice and is questioned by investigators, he’ll say he can’t remember if he’d hit the brakes or not.
“…an obsession with how sex connects to danger and danger connects to sex…”
The investigators, they’ll mention to Shooter with some disdain that his tires laid no rubber down in the street or sidewalk in front of the theater. Almost like his foot wasn’t on the brake. Almost as if–
“…sex that lets us taste death. Death that lets us taste sex…”
Shooter never speaks about what happens next, about the moment just before the collision. Not to Katrine. Not to his partner. Not to the mandated cop-therapist he head-fucks (and sometimes just plain fucks) on the side. He never even lets himself think about it in the days to come. He never mentions his suspicion—the closest Shooter ever comes to being actually smart—that he and Katrine aren’t alike at all. Katrine creates a game wherein all forces run in opposition to her, a game that’s impossible to beat, just to see if she can beat it anyway. The game of a killer. And Shooter isn’t a partner in the game; he’s the primary piece that she set in opposition against herself.
“What good’s a Shooter without his gun?”
Shooter never speaks or even lets himself think about what happens next. About how he realizes that, like Katrine, he so desperately needs the game, too. Except, unlike Katrine, he so badly wants someone to beat him at it.
Shooter never tells anyone about how his boot presses the accelerator down to the fucking floor.
“Quod me nutrit me destruit.”
The headlights in his rearview swerve away and the other car pulls out just as Shooter’s car collides into the old-fashioned theater, the neon lights exploding all around him, a screaming ejaculation of glass and art deco signage and sparks and chrome and flame.
The seven red letters on the marquee fall onto Shooter’s hood like fired bullets, a chaotic jumble of letters broken into chaos.
But with the right kind of eyes, with that black glowing light within, with a certain kind of instinct, one can look into that pandemonium of danger and chaos upon his accordioned, burning hood and still spell the mismatched letters out easily.
His head resting and bleeding against the steering wheel, Shooter eyes the scattered letters and whispers, “Vertigo.”
Before unconsciousness takes him, Shooter can’t stop himself from sneering a smile of the goddamned.
This is the best sex he’s ever had.