Pure Hate by Wrath James White

organs, ripping him open. But he
never felt the knife.
    What happened next remained locked in
the place where past pain hides from the conscious mind, a profound chasm half-filled
with chimerical nightmares, nebulous impressions, and abstract sensations. A
vague recollection of not being able to breathe, feeling Malcolm’s powerful
arms crushing down over his throat. Mixed feelings of pleasure and pain, of
vulnerability, of surrender, of sheer horror and something that he could not
accept, could not believe. Even now his mind retreated from it. What he’d felt
had been sexual excitement simultaneous with the certainty of death.
    But those memories were all obscure,
wisps and shadows, shreds of memory coming to him as if from a dream. He’d
awakened crumpled on the floor in a bathroom stall, not quite certain why he
was alive. Malcolm had not killed him.
    That had been the last time he’d seen
Malcolm until last night and now, as he had then, he had no idea why Malcolm
let him live.
    James got up from his chair and turned to leave.
He felt woozy, needed air. This case just seemed to get more and more horrible.
    “Renee’ and that other girl, Natasha, do they
still live in Philly?”
    “Probably. Nobody ever leaves Philly. It’s like a
black hole, but I don’t have their addresses or anything.”
    “Where did they live back then?”
    “Renee’ lived in Frankford. Natasha lived in
Germantown a few blocks from Malcolm. Her mom was one of those liberal hippie
types.” Reed offered that last bit of information as a way of explaining why a
white woman would live with her young daughter in a black ghetto. James tried
his best not to be offended and failed.
    “I’ll have Dispatch locate them for me. What were
their last names?”
    “Renee’s last name was Volare’.”
    “Volare’? Like the song?”
    “Yeah, like the song. Natasha’s name was
something Indian sounding. I can’t remember it.”
    “Take my card and call me if you
remember it. If Malcolm went after you, he
might go after them. I’m placing you under protective custody. There’ll be an officer
posted outside your door.”
    “You think he’ll come after me again?”
    James thought about everything he’d heard tonight
and considered lying but instead he gave it to him straight.
    “I think that a man who slit his own throat and
tried to blow himself up isn’t gonna stop until he feels he’s avenged whatever
wrong you’ve done to him or until we stop him.”
    Never leave an enemy behind or he will rise
again to fly at your throat!
    A shiver slithered up Reed’s back and scampered
across his neck and shoulders. He stared at the detective, his eyes widening in
fear. He swallowed hard and tried to speak, but he had nothing to say. What
could he say? He wanted the detective to say something, to say that he
would stop Malcolm, that he would keep him from ever hurting anyone again.
    James, feeling guilty, like maybe he had been a
little too harsh, offered Reed a few comforting words.
    “Look, I don’t know if it helps any, but I think
Malcolm was deeply disturbed long before you came along.”
    “Yeah, but would he have become what he’s become?
Would he be a killer if it weren’t for me?”
    James didn’t know and he hated to think that
there might be any justification for the horrible things that had been done to
this man’s family, but he also believed that friends didn’t steal each other’s
girlfriends. Bros before hoes. That’s what he’d always preached and practiced.
This man had violated that male code and destroyed a man in the process. He had
paid with the lives of his family.
    “I don’t know.”
    James left without another word.

X.
    Renee’ Volare’ lived with her husband and three
boys in Fishtown, the white trash district. James found the entire neighborhood
depressing, pitiful, and just plain bizarre. Growing up in a black ghetto,
watching white people on TV who seemed to have everything except problems,
seeing these