by Chris Bauer
1966, four years after the bank robbery. A drifter dishwasher raped a local high school girl. An unreported brutal, sadistic crime, but the traumatized young victim confided to a friend. Kitty heard about it, which begot the dishwasher’s execution, this time with no body found. “The Centralia coal mine fire. New back then,” she’d explained. “A thousand degrees down there, with sinkholes and other mine subsidence holes,” like one behind a Centralia graveyard. After the execution, an anonymous letter and pictures sent to the raped girl, with a plea to remain quiet, informed her of the vigilante vindication.
1972. Severe domestic abuse in a Rancor household, repeat occurrences, life threatening. Unreported by a terrified wife, but she had friends. Kitty heard about it and shot the bastard husband. “Centralia’s coal seams, still burning,” Kitty told Andy. “More fire in the hole.” No body meant no crime. An anonymous letter to the wife, for closure, and another plea for secrecy.
1975. A Rancor Vietnam veteran who lived in the woods was beaten, robbed, doused in kerosene then set ablaze. Never reported missing, but the itinerant coal miner who killed him blabbed. Kitty heard about it. Retribution. Fire in the hole, then an anonymous letter to the homeless man’s parents.
A few others since then, all needing punishment. Infrequent transgressions. Kitty heard about them. Centralia’s hellish sinkholes never refused the bodies. Again, anonymous letters. The urban legend, that of a mysterious Rancor, Pennsylvania, boogeybitch, had been soundly solidified.
That day, when Aunt Kitty confessed about her deadly moonlighting, she also approached Andy with a plea. “I’m tired. One person is all we need. One discreet person to accept this responsibility for our town, whenever the need arises.”
And who more appropriate than you, my brother’s son, she’d said to him. For the good of the town, Andy. To deny future transgressions by sending these monsters to hell. To keep the town safe, Andy. Please, Andy.
But what about the implications, Aunt Kitty? About getting caught? What about my young daughter, Aunt Kitty? And what about me not wanting to kill another human being in cold blood?
The sting of having lost his father to violence had lessened in the twenty-five years that had passed, though not fully; Andy’s emotional scars were still healing. Time, a good life with his surgeon mother, plus Andy’s own nursing career and his small B&B: while it remained an uphill battle, all continued to work on dulling the trauma he’d experienced as a child.
Andy Prudhomme, picked to learn from the original by the original, the legend. If he’d accepted, it would have been his cross to bear while he walked among the population and carried a big, retributional stick, silently and anonymously, like his aunt Kitty had.
Charlotte dozed off in Andy’s arms, exhausted. Time for him to supervise the preparation of the B&B breakfast; no more sleep this morning for him.
The town remained safe, a wonderful place to live, the safest it had ever been. The benefit of anonymity, and of being viewed only from a distance. With the release of the People magazine article, the anonymity was gone.
He tucked his mother back into bed then saw himself out of the room.
Andy was thirty when he’d said no to Kitty, but he did accept her guns.
17
It was Ms. Townsend’s fault. Randall’s Wisconsin high school music teacher; she, forty-two, him, not quite fifteen. Her fault for him being the way he was, his predawn subconscious told him as he lay in bed in his utilitarian motel room in Dickson City. She introduced him to sex.
They’d handed him a tuba to play in the marching band. After his second music lesson with her she told him how much she liked his sensual, full lips. She wanted to know if he liked hers, and how would he like them wrapped around that schoolboy cock of his?
And he did like her lips just where she’d suggested. He was gifted, she’d told him. Women would love him when they learned what was in his pants, flock to him, would want him to do to them what he’d started doing to her after school three days a week his entire sophomore year. He had, in her words, a magnificently pagan dick. Porn-star quality.
Then, without notice, she quit him. Gave him shit about how he’d started to scare her with his own heightened sexual appetite. After she cut him loose, he couldn’t pass her in the school hallways without going rigid and needing to relieve himself in the lavatory. That much sex, with all her screaming, pounding, and intensity, had made it so that he needed new outlets. He took what he could get, whenever, wherever. High school, playground, church, mall. Girls, guys too. Except he wanted the music teacher back. She knew how to do things. And she’d been his first.
One late afternoon after he forced her into a school broom closet, she further solidified her distinction with two additional firsts for him: rape and murder. As luck would have it, the other “last person to see her alive” had been the married high school band moderator whom she’d been banging as well. Motive, opportunity, and a number of people had seen her and Bow-tie Benson flirting over the prior few months. Circumstantial evidence got Mr. Benson twenty-years-to-life for her second-degree strangulation murder.
Her eyes. Oh yes, he loved how they’d roll up into her head during the throes of her ecstasy when the grinding of his engorged cock tickled that sweet spot of hers. Especially that last time. The visual—their whites about to pop as he strangled the life out of her while she fought him—this had really gotten him off.
The dream, her stricken face freeze-framed in terror, her orgasmic death rattle: he was as hard as a rhino horn now that he was fully awake. To the motel room toilet. After that, he’d rub one out.
They would all soon know. They’d find the classic Chevy deep underground, plugging a Pocono cave. They’d find the used car dealer’s body in the trunk. Some of Mrs. Spezak’s worried friends would have reported her missing. Stephen Linkletter, aka Randall Burton, accused predator out on bail and living with her, and also missing, would become a person of interest.
FBI and state law enforcement. If they hadn’t already involved themselves, they would now. All except for the local Rancor police, consisting of one cop. One. Not even a real cop, an elected sheriff. Randall liked Rancor, Pennsylvania, for the same reason he liked so many of his victims: they were defenseless.
Back to Ms. Townsend. Back to big tits and tubas. Oh, how she loved his junk. He was nothing, she’d screamed at him while she rode the knob fantastic, if not for his lovingly large package. God’s gift to him, and Randall’s gift to women and other impressionable, vulnerable creatures. Sometimes whether they wanted it or not.
His junk made him the man he was. Without it, he was ordinary. Without it, he was the antisocial, abandoned loser-child who no one ever had any time for. But when they caught him—when he finally let that happen—this would all change. They’d all want a piece of him.
Hail to his junk, long may it live. Long enough to find Regina and his kid. Long enough to know he’d left something of value behind.
18
I dragged myself downstairs, arrived under the wire for breakfast in the B&B dining room. My deputies were sleeping in.
A feast worthy of a Philly longshoreman. Thick French toast soaked in melted butter pecan ice cream then baked until golden brown. Pure maple syrup. Butter. Combined, a day’s worth of calories in one forkful. Plus sausage patties and hash browns. Just looking at it I could feel my arteries harden.
Andy the B&B proprietor pushed through the swinging doors from the kitchen, dropped into the chair across from me at a table that could seat ten, today set for only three. I sipped a glass of orange juice, shared with him where I was until four this morning, and rambled about the pothole tragedy with the vintage Impala. He waited until I was finished my story.
“My dad had a sixties Chevy Impala too,” he said. “Really loved that car.”
Some quiet between us while I ate and Andy remembered. Eyes lowered, he skirted past his dark cloud, followed up his tendered memory with an admission: “I knew about the car in the hole
already. Dody Heck called me. She’s not taking the park trespass well.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “She’s a former cop.”
“It’s more than that. Her husband was a cop too. Killed in the line of duty, in Scranton. That’s when she decided to retire as Rancor police chief.”
“Sorry. Killed how?”
“Street gang. Nothing like New York or California, but they’re still a problem. For some of Scranton’s young adults, many descendants from old coal-cracking families, the economy isn’t picking up fast enough, so they’re making poor decisions. Plus New York gang members passing through sometimes look to have fun with the locals. Occasional drive-bys.
“The point is we’ll clean up this mess with the car at the park and get on with our lives. It’s what we do.” He softened his look. “Do you bowl?”
A polite yes nod from me with a small smile that changed my yes to a slow headshake that said no, not really, a nice way of saying that bowling was not at the top of my preferred entertainment list. “Something I never got into. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”
A chuckle from Andy. “Dody’s ribbing me about tonight’s senior mixed doubles championship final. My team against hers. Rancor will be a-rocking.”
I buttered a homemade muffin but didn’t take a bite, squinting at him. Something on my mind, and asking about it was going to sound rude.
“How old are you?”
He gave me an are-you-for-real look, deciding if I was charming or pathetically clueless. “Was that the Tourette’s, or you really need me to answer that?”
“Just working my way to a compliment. Aside from two or three people at the bowling alley yesterday, I saw no one under the age of fifty. How can you be bowling in a seniors league?”
“Anyone fifty-five and over can bowl in the league. I’m fifty-six.”
Confusion or appreciation, I wasn’t sure what my face registered. “Huh. I mean, really. Huh.”
“Good genes,” he said, “monster gym workouts. And I only nibble at these breakfasts. No other help.”
Preemptive on his part, the translation being, before I had a chance to really embarrass myself, he’d had no cosmetic surgery, except I didn’t embarrass easily.
“No surgery then. Good for you.”
“Wiseass.”
“A relief to hear that, Mr. Prudhomme,” I said. “I was expecting ‘asshole.’”
“Look—Counsel,” his expression said I’d scored some points, “repeat guests call me Andy. I hope you’ll be one of them. Only because you’re, you know, special, with your Tourette’s and all.”
“Asshole. I mean fine, Andy.”
“Apology accepted, Counsel.”
I bit into the muffin then returned it to my plate, could eat no more. Andy pushed himself away from the table, excused himself.
Last call, since we were sharing. “So tell me, Andy, your mother makes your wife sound like the Antichrist. She seems like a great cook. She has to have some other redeeming qualities.”
He stood. “The cook’s not my wife. I’m divorced.” He paused for effect, his smile gone. “You finished with your breakfast, Miss Fungo?”
19
My deputies and I were in my van in a Rancor strip mall parking lot, checking out my new phone service. The bugged Stephen Linkletter Chevy Impala ship had sailed, but I was liking this new toy anyway. I mouthed a thank-you to my absent trooper buddy Vonetta while I keyed “Andrew Prudhomme” and “Rancor, PA” into a search engine.
A sighting on someone’s social register pages: Andrew Prudhomme, Rancor, PA. Staff nurse, Scranton State Hospital… Good Samaritan Award… Dr. Jasmine Prudhomme, CEO and Chief Administrator, the state hospital in Scranton… her handsome husband Andrew Prudhomme at a Rancor fundraiser…
“Let’s look for more on the wife, shall we?” I said to Tess, her head resting on her paws on the front seat. She grunted her agreement.
And yes, here she was again, more pictures of Andy’s ex.
Dr. Jasmine Prudhomme, head of the state hospital, with Philadelphia socialite and hospital contributor Joseph Kullard…
Dr. Jasmine Prudhomme was in a gown. Small woman, fake chest.
Dr. Jasmine Prudhomme. Charges of sexual misconduct with young male psychiatric inpatients have been dropped…
Whoa.
Andy’s ex was an accused sexual predator, but she’d gotten off. And on her arm in this picture was a younger man, early thirties at best, in a tux. No way the stud and her weren’t a couple. The guy was a main line Philly socialite with money. I agreed with Andy; I now didn’t like his wife either.
But there was more. A lot.
Scranton Times-Tribune: Jasmine Prudhomme, MD, former local hospital CEO, found slain in Philadelphia. Subsequent articles on the attack had followed over multiple weeks in the Times Tribune and the Philly Inquirer. A more recent article said the murder remained unsolved.
Huh. More violence. Not here, yet it did involve someone from this supposed violence-free hamlet. Add this to what had happened to Dody’s cop husband in nearby Scranton. Unnerving.
Ten seconds in ponder mode, then I moved on. I used my new toy to take some quick pics of my dogs. I pointed and snapped one of me puckering, a big smooch at the camera, sent it and all the K9 shots to Vonetta. I got a text back.
Dogs look great fungo. BTW you need to get laid, lady.
I could have texted her back, to confess that I saw the bounty last night, the guy with a gas container. I could have told her how my dogs’ sniff test of the Poland Spring water bottles had settled it, that the same person handled both bottles. The gas container was a nice touch on the bounty’s part, there supposedly to fill up a white ’80s Buick. Yet with no face or head recognition because of the hoodie, I blew the ID. I could have told her all this, but I didn’t, to maybe avoid hearing Vonetta say “shithead” four times in a six-word sentence, about how oblivious I was on occasion. I texted her this leading question instead.
You still Catholic?
Does the Pope shit on a bear? Hell yeah I’m still Catholic, counsel. I like the schools here in Bethlehem. Sup with that?
Ever hear of a Saint Possenti?
Because I never had, I told her. Not as a kid in Catholic school or as an adult when I was still practicing. My not knowing wasn’t a stretch, considering I pretty much lapsed myself onto hell’s doorstep after my ex was gone. I told Vonetta about my new teenage cub cadet park ranger buddy Trevor’s mention of this saint in relation to a bingo hall, to give her context. She texted back that yes, she’d heard of him.
St Gabriel Possenti. Not cause I’m Catholic. Cause I’m a gun owner
Not following you, netta
You got a new cell provider. Go look him up. I gotta go. Alleged perps want bailing out
I keyed in the search for a Saint Gabriel Possenti. Thirty-seven thousand results. Catholic votive prayers to Blessed Gabriel, Gabriel of Our Lady Of Sorrows, Gabriel Of the Sorrowful Virgin, plus a long wiki entry loaded with the saint’s mid-nineteenth century life in Italy, his calling to the cloth, his miracles, and his early death at age twenty-four from TB. I quit part way through the wiki, impatient. Then I clicked on this: St. Gabriel Possenti Society.
gunsaint.com
Patron Saint of Handgunners
A website for gun-wielding Catholics. Their mission was to have the Vatican reinvent this saint in their image and likeness on the strength of a legend: his pre-priesthood skills as a marksman saved an Italian town from marauding bandits in 1860. Contributions to the society were United Way eligible.
Only one actual church listing popped up in the search, St. Gabriel Possenti of the Sorrowful Mother, 150 miles south of here.
I rechecked the search results. Other Catholic churches and parishes in and around Rancor and Scranton, but no St. Gabriel Possenti. Yet St. Possenti’s Church had what appeared to be a thriving bingo operation in Rancor, but no church presence to go along with it.
Maybe bingo didn’t mea
n bingo.
A commotion in front of me, outside the Rancor Family Pharmacy. A gangbanger in a Dodgers baseball cap on his way out of the pharmacy in a hurry knocked a young mom and her toddler son on their asses. The banger had enough bling around his neck to choke a pharaoh, with low-riding pants belted barely thigh-high. Hispanic. Couldn’t miss the waistband of his white boxers with dancing valentine hearts. A bad stereotype. The dude leaned down to apologize to the woman.
Oops. It wasn’t an apology. He grabbed her purse, speed-walked around the corner of the building and disappeared. No way Mr. Dodger could outrun anyone in those low-rider pants; someone had to be waiting for him in a car.
Tess and Fungo growled in unison; it was uncanny how they felt my tension sometimes. Fungo was out of his cage, nudging my shoulder. I grabbed Tess’s collar and held her back, then I grabbed Fungo’s nose to get his attention. He had his harness on, which to him meant he was already on the job. “Okay, dude, let’s do this.”
A button on my door panel opened the van’s sliding side door. Target acquired, Fungo was gone, his leash trailing him. I slammed the van in gear, my tires squealing. We followed Fungo to the corner of the building, past a white-haired woman quick to help the young mother to her feet.
I liked it when scumbags did stupid shit in broad daylight practically begging for a confrontation. I unsnapped my seat belt.
Mr. Dodger quickstepped to a tricked-out Honda Civic with Jersey plates and someone at the wheel, the engine idling. He lobbed a plastic shopping bag through an open rear window, hung on to the purse, then dropped himself into the front seat.
A purse-stealing perp plus his driver, a hemorrhoid-red custom ride sitting in a loading zone, a loud, rumbling engine idle, and rap music. In addition to the other bad behavior, the music had to be a noise ordinance violation for sure. Plus I hated rap. Reasons enough for this citizen with a permit to carry and her trusted sidekicks to confront these young men. I stopped my black-and-gold van on a diagonal in front of the Honda. The dumbasses were wedged in.
