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Their Own Dead: a Piece of Homicide Fan Fiction

He is encircled by warm bodies, their temperature a rarity in his line of work,
but feels utterly alone.

He is suffering silent agonies, and the booze that surrounds him is a plentiful
anesthetic for this pain and the pain to come, but for now he abstains.

John Munch wants only to be somewhere else, sometime else.

*

Brodie's pained announcement that Al Giardello was dead had impacted with
all of the cold cruelty of a leaden weight, and save Kay Howard's choked sobs,
had instantly muted the inhabitants of The Waterfront. The abrupt jolt having
subsided, the news now simply hangs in the air, its meaning as seemingly solid
as the cigarette smoke sneaking across the ceiling and even more acrid to Detective
Munch's sensibilities. Mumbles, cracked sighs, and sniffles die as quickly as they are
sounded, all futile attempts to pierce the turgid aura of silence that remains. When he
can no longer bear the weight of the void expanding with each groan from Howard's
chest, Munch rises from his stool and steps outside.

The door to The Waterfront never seemed so heavy or awkwardly manipulated, he notices.

The night is fair and silent with a slight breeze emanating from across the glassy waters
of the nearby harbor. As Munch's eyes adjust, he scans the swollen, sentry-like headquarters
looming before him, an unchanging bastion in an unending war, and wishes, vaguely, that its
stubborn structure would be razed, its foundation leveled and reduced to ancient dust and
bricks. He realizes, of course, that the odds of such a deconstruction are no more likely than
the end of the battle in which it has so long been employed.

There is a squeak and a shuffle from behind. Still narcotized by word of Gee's death, Munch
can only allow for a slow, disinterested glance over his shoulder.

It is a pleasant surprise, then, when a rotund, pasty-complexioned figure emerges from
the smothering sadness of the Waterfront. He is Big Man, Stanley Bolander, Munch's
ex-partner, and at one time the squad's senior most detective. Now, without a formal
title, stripped away like his pants at the fatefully Bacchanalian police lodge party that
essentially ended his career, he is simply a weatherworn reminder of investigations past.

On a personal level, however, Munch still holds Bolander in the highest regard, public
nudity or no public nudity, and has always been as likely to openly profess his respect
as Bolander to completely and utterly withhold it. For the emotionally needy Munch,
the relationship the two shared during their partnership was as much a quest for
affirmation as it was for murderers.

Yet murderers splattered blood, neglected to recover shell casings, or ignorantly
deposited their very genetic material in the wake of their struggles or ill begotten orgasms.
Physical evidence, in other words. Concrete. Traceable. On the other hand, praise from
Bolander, or rather, the means to inspire it, were ethereal things Munch had pursued for
years without success. If only the path to self-confidence were as clear as the path to the
killer whose fingerprints, solid, tangible whorls of dirt and oil, has connected him or her
to the deed.

Though, hadn't Munch sensed a flicker of clumsily concealed respect after the shooting
incident, after a bullet had rent Bolander's skull in a thunderclap explosion, after the squad's
venerable, old investigator had bled pints enough to ruin Munch's loafers?

Wasn't that appreciation, or at least some semblance of it, in Big Man's morphine-glazed
eyes as the grizzled, graying father figure lied prone, slipping in and out of consciousness
beneath a tangle of intravenous tubes and blipping monitors? Munch had visited him every
day of his arduous convalescence, and hadn't the bedside glances exchanged by the two
resonated more loudly than words? Following his release from the hospital, hadn't it been
Munch's apartment Stanley had visited, his company the haunted detective had sought that
evening the nightmares were too much, the loneliness was too much, the throbbing pain in
his freshly scarred head was too much, the memories of the attack, the crack of the gun,
the harsh smell of the cordite, was too much?

Maybe Bolander saw his previous partner, Mitch Drummond, upon whom he heaped
countless lauds while in the presence of Munch, as the good son, the one a man can
safely appreciate out loud. In contrast, maybe Munch was the skewed child, not “bad,”
but simply different, simply “yang,” whom Bolander quietly admired for exhibiting the
characteristics he himself wished he had the audacity to so freely and frequently display.

Or maybe that damned Razor of Ockham, always sharp enough to cleave the thickest
of deluded rationalizations, could claim another victory over false hope. Maybe former
detective Stanley Bolander truly disliked former partner John Munch. Always had.

Maybe it was just that simple. As simple as a shot to the head.

Or multiple shots to the abdomen.

“Munch,” Bolander offers with a gentle sort of trepidation. So undermined by an
incalculable sense of loss and exhaustion, the stray syllable suggests neither a statement
of fact or a question. But because his very existence suddenly seems little more than an
unanswered inquiry, Munch answers in turn.

“Yeah, Stan. Its me.”

Whatever that means, he thinks.

With a tired grunt, Bolander arrives at Munch’s shoulder, a pair of tarnished warriors
soaking in the crisp air and the fouled moment. For a time, they refrain from the unnecessary
trappings of speech. Munch knows, at some level, though, that words are ultimately required,
that consolation is in order, that frayed edges are suddenly in need of mending, and so is
relieved when his usually taciturn peer finally initiates.

“Well, it’s finally over,” Bolander says, staring in tandem with Munch at the forever
unflinching squadroom.

“What’s that, Big Man?” Munch asks. “What’s finally over?”

“Everything that has defined the last half of my life is over and gone, or at least changed
beyond recognition.”

Munch diverts his attention from the moonlight-garnished leviathan of architecture
across the street to Bolander, himself. The Big Man’s eyes are sunken, but questing
and alert in the pain they so ineffectually hide.

“How’s that?”

A pause as two oblivious revelers, a young couple embracing and whispering, cross
the threshold of The Waterfront. The clomp of trodden cobble is enough to fill in the
potentially awkward silence.

“It would have been nice to have seen Giardello,” Bolander responds dreamily, and
Munch assumes the introvert is only trying to change the subject. “You know, as a
reminder of the old ways.”

Munch immediately comprehends and nods, now realizing that the subject is the
only thing that hasn’t changed.

There is another pause, this one inconveniently unattributable to passersby.
Munch looks at the ground, feeling uncharacteristically sheepish.

 “The walls are all wrong over there,” Bolander eventually says as he points across
the street, his gravelly voice reaching a crescendo of frustration. “Everything is out
of place, and there’s too much blue. Too much red, too.”

“You’re right, Big Man,” Munch pipes up. “There’re too many open cases. Right now.
But these things are cyclic. Two months from now, the brass’ll be divvying out promotions
and metals. Departmental bread and circuses. You’ll see.”

“No,” Bolander responds with a cool and unwaveringly fatalistic certainty. “I can sense it.
There’s too much of everything, and not enough of something. I don’t know.”

 Munch fumbles for a response, and, moistening his parched lips, prepares to embarrass
himself with the only thing his taxed brain can muster: maudlin sentiments, impotent
encouragement completely incapable of righting an irreversible wrong.

“Stanley, I—“

The bar door opens, leaking two figures with the strains of a dirge-sounding jukebox
tune on their heels.

“Stanley?”

Kay Howard abandons the embrace of Assistant States Attorney Ed Danvers and,
recognizing the lamenting contortions in the furrows of her old friend’s ashen brow,
falls into Bolander’s arms. He rejoins with a tentative hug, a stilted attempt to give
comfort where none is present. Nevertheless, together again, Howard’s hot tears
on his throat, Big Man relaxes in the realization that even the simplest of acts amounts
to something at a time like this.

He holds her tightly, and with feeling.

“I know, Kay,” he says with a pat to her back. “I know.”

“He’s dead,” she whimpers. “First Beau and now this.”

Munch can’t help but cringe at the sound of Howard in such distress. A glance at the
diminutive Ed Danvers reveals a similar reaction.

“Come on, Kay,” the attorney intervenes, having intercepted Munch’s concerned look.
“Let’s go home.”

From Bolander’s ample chest she raises her head and, with aggravated, bloodshot eyes
as copper as her shoulder-length hair, gazes into the face of the man whose very innards
had once intermingled with her own on a dirty linoleum floor five long years prior,
mouthing thank you...thank you.

And then to Munch, be safe, Munchkin.

As the two former lovers dejectedly follow in the footsteps of the pair of present day
sweethearts, by now embracing against a steel railing overlooking the harbor, Danvers
wheels around, waving.

“Goodnight, you guys,” he says. “I’m sorry about your loss.”

And then, after a second of consideration: “Our loss.”

Hunched and sporting a perpetual fragility, Danvers is a man familiar with the concept
of  loss, his fiancée having been killed in a 1997 bridal shop hold-up. That case had
been closed by Bayliss and Pembleton, the same detectives now so conspicuous in
their absence, the same detectives so instrumental in the capture of Giardello’s shooter.

Murderer, Munch corrects himself.

Still contemplating the gauzy horizon as it swallows Howard and Danvers, Munch
voices what he expects to be a reassurance.

“See, Big Man? The old ways remain. You just need to know where to look.”

Bolander evinces a placid countenance as he fingers a strand of Kays crimson curls
left on the lapel of his sport coat.

“Yeah, I know,” he whispers. “But, when you think about it, Munch, the old ways
really weren’t that great anyway.”

Munch considers this, considers Beau Felton, long since interred, decapitated but
dressed in his finest suit, no head but no place to go. He considers fearless leader
Giardello, soon to be a hulking slab positioned unknowingly beneath a medical
examiner’s blade. He considers Kay Howard, once rigidly self-assured, now
inconsolable and helpless, and, of course, Stanley, the giddily depressed
sexagenarian on borrowed time quivering at his side.

Munch finds he can’t possibly disagree, but only acquiesce.

“Yet we remain,” he says, only half lying, only half believing his own clipped,
sluggishly paced words. “We’re here. You and I. Living if only for the sake
of living. We’ve hurt like this before. These things count. They have meaning.”

“Matthew 8:22,” Bolander says, merely.

“Pardon?”

“It’s a line from the Bible that I remember from my Sunday school days.
It always stuck with me, especially doing this job, and especially on nights like this.”

 “Why’s that? Whats the line?”

“It’s something Jesus said to one of his disciples whose dad had just died.
He said ‘let the dead bury their own dead.’”

As the meaning of the words sinks in, Munch preaches scripture softly to
his shoes, the only audience this suddenly humbled speaker can reasonably face.

“’Let the dead bury their own dead,’ huh?”

“Which do you think we are?” Bolander asks.

Even with head down, Munch can sense the Big Man’s rheumy blues are suddenly
on him, pleading for a genuine response.

And in his answer, Munch speaks only the truth.

“I don’t know, Stan.”
 

Biography: My name is Joe Weiss, a 22 year old student of communications at The University of Texas at San Antonio. I’ve been a devoted fan of H:LOTS since stumbling upon an airing of “A Doll’s Eyes” in 1997. This, “Their Own Dead,” is my first piece of fan fiction.