Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author. She wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide, and the collections While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Scary Out There, Seize the Night, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
The Kind Detective is a gritty Lovecraftian tale with a protagonist who is unstoppably kind at his very core, but the case he finds himself smack in the middle of just might pull him up from his roots. Here is the opening scene:
One Sunday at exactly 4pm, Detective Craig McGill was
nursing an Irish coffee and poring over the cold-case murder photos spread
across his cigarette-pocked kitchen table. His eyes ached. There had to be some small but crucial details
he missed the first twenty times he studied these black-and-white snapshots of
death and misery. He was certain, sure as a priest about the truth of a loving
God, that if he just looked at things the right way, he’d solve these grisly
puzzles. Justice would be served. And if a horror could be met with no meaningful
justice, at least grieving families could finally gain some closure.
A loud bang! made him reflexively dive to the
worn yellow linoleum floor. His ears popped as if he were on a jet that had
taken a sudden 20,000-foot plunge. Vertigo surged bile into his throat as he
rolled sideways to draw the .38 revolver he kept in a holster bolted beneath
the table.
He crouched
in the shadow of the table, waiting for another bang! None came. It hadn’t been gunfire. Too loud, too low. But it
had come from the street in front of his house. Maybe closer. A bomb? His mind
flashed on the pressure cooker IEDs the narc squad had recovered from a
backwoods meth lab. Who would have tossed a bomb into his yard? The local Klan, angry that he’d sent one of
their boys to Angola for murder? Gangbangers? A random lunatic?
After a ten
count, he crouch-ran to the living room window and peeked through mini-blinds. The
only thing that registered at first was that something was terribly wrong with his yard. But for a couple of seconds his brain
rejected the missives from his eyes because what he beheld was an
impossibility.
The massive
pecan tree that shaded the front yard of the shotgun bungalow since his
grandfather built it in 1930 was gone. Not exploded, not burned down – gone. It had a canopy as wide as the
house and a trunk he couldn’t get his arms around and there wasn’t a stick or
leaf left of it. Not even the main roots remained. A wide, perfectly
hemispherical scoop of dirt and concrete sidewalk was gone, too. McGill was relieved
that the water and gas mains hadn’t been broken.
Nobody was
visible on his street except for his catty-corner neighbor, Mrs. Fontenot. He
gave her all his pecans every fall, and the pies she made from them were one of
the purest joys in his life. Before he tasted one, he’d scoffed at people who
declared that this or that food was a religious experience. Mrs. Fontenot made
him a believer. His first bite made him declare that she should be a pastry
chef, and she laughed and replied that it would be the ruination of a fine
hobby.
Mrs.
Fontenot was dressed in her gardening hat and matching lavender gloves and
rubber boots and sat beside a scooped crater in her front yard. Her magnolia
was gone. She was hunched over, listing to the side in the way that people do when
they are in profound shock.
McGill
shoved his pistol in the back waistband of his cargo pants and hurried out to
see if she needed help. The heavy smells of tree root sap and fresh overturned
soil were thick in the humid air. He glanced down at his missing tree’s crater as
he hurried past it. The remaining roots were cleanly severed at the margin of
the hemisphere. What kind of machine could have done such a thing? And why?
“Miz
Fontenot, are you okay?” he called as he scanned the street for strange
vehicles. His snap judgement that this was the work of criminals he’d crossed
seemed ridiculous now. Someone who could take a pair of big old trees like this
could have taken his whole house with him inside it. But someone did do this
strange, powerful thing, so maybe the perpetrator was watching? The hand of God
hadn’t just scooped out their trees. The universe didn’t work that way. Did it?
Mrs.
Fontenot made no reply to his call, did not move, so he ran over and knelt
beside her.
“Miz Fontenot?”
He gently touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
She slowly
turned to face him. Her dark face was wet with tears, and her brown eyes stared
wide. He’d once seen that same expression on a small boy who’d watched his
father cut up his mother with a hatchet.
“Oh …
Detective. So fine of you to visit.” Her voice was as flat as a salt marsh.
“Did you
see what happened?”
“I saw … I
saw ….”
She started
to weep. Deep, wracking, soul-wrenching sobs. People her age who got this upset
sometimes had heart attacks or strokes. McGill wondered if he should call for a
squad, but he wasn’t sure if she had health insurance. If she didn’t, the
ambulance and ER bills might break her. She didn’t seem to be in immediate
danger. Maybe she just needed a chance to rest and gather herself.
“Can you
stand up? Let’s get you inside. I’ll make you some tea.”
He gently
helped her up and escorted her back into her house. She stopped crying, but her
whole body shook as if she were walking through snow. Shock, definitely. He got
her settled in her easy chair, pulled off her boots, and tucked a crocheted
afghan over her legs so she’d stay warm.
“Thank you,
Detective. You’re a kind man. Don’t let nothing tell you otherwise.”
McGill
smiled at her and went into her kitchen to put the kettle on.
When he
returned with a steaming mug of chamomile tea, Mrs. Fontenot was dead.
The purely
practical part of McGill’s mind told him that a squad wouldn’t have arrived in
time to save her. They just wouldn’t bust the speed limit for a black lady with
vague symptoms, not even if a white off-duty cop was calling on her behalf. And
that renewed realization – the system
he served was horribly flawed – made the mess of sadness, anger and guilt stewing
in his skull almost boil over.
He hadn’t shed
a single tear at any of the terrible murder scenes he’d investigated. Nobody
wanted an emotional cop. It was not professional,
it was not manly, and he would not weep
now for this sweet old lady slumped in her favorite chair, even if nobody could
possibly see him.
He would
not cry. He would do his job: find out who did this to her. This wasn’t technically murder, but he was sure to
his core that whoever took her tree, took her life just the same. He would work
this like any other case, and he would solve it, and there would be justice.
