The Exterminator

by Peter McCurtin

  “Fuck off,” Eastland said again, and the three whores ran out without waiting to pick up their shoes. Their feet made slapping sounds on the stairs, the front door banged.

  Smiley stood up holding out his hands as if to ward off bullets. His mouth twitched in the center of his carefully shaped Spanish grandee’s beard; he still wore the black beret with the leather edging. The rifle fascinated him, and he looked at it more than he looked at Eastland.

  “Hey man, I’m sorry about what happened,” Smiley said. “I mean we didn’t hurt you. We could have come after you but we didn’t. So what’s this thing to you?”

  Eastland’s finger twitched on the trigger. “Turn around and put up your hands. Do it, motherfuckers.”

  Staying cool meant everything to Smiley, but that wasn’t so easy with an automatic rifle pointing at his gut. Still, he tried.

  “Shit man, what’s the big deal?” Smiley said. “That guy was just a nigger.”

  Eastland had to fight hard to keep from spraying the room with bullets. But that would be too fucking easy. To get sprayed with an M-16 meant you died instantly; what he had planned for Smiley and his pals was much more special. Going apeshit with the 16 would just fuck it up.

  “That nigger,” Eastland said slowly, “was my best friend.”

  Smiley’s courage began to die. “Well listen, man, we didn’t know that. We were drunk and stoned, that’s how it happened. You have to believe we’re sorry for what we did. And there’s doctors, specialists that can fix up your friend. There’s nothing doctors can’t do these …”

  Shimmy sprang at Eastland and a short burst from the rifle cut him down in mid-air. Eastland swung the rifle toward Smiley and Paco jumped him, pulling a knife from a neck sheath. It was a thick-bladed Bowie and Paco used it like a short sword. Eastland blocked the first chop, then smashed Paco in the face with the butt of the rifle. Paco went down like a stone and stayed down. Eastland whirled to face Smiley, who was coming at him from the other side with a switchblade. He stopped when Eastland pointed the rifle.

  “Throw it away,” Eastland said, holding the rifle rock steady. “I can blow your arm off at the shoulder.”

  The knife clattered to the floor and Smiley began to retreat, backing away until the wall stopped him. It was good to see the fear in Smiley’s eyes. Eastland put down the rifle. “Now there’s just you and me,” Eastland said. He jerked his thumb toward the rifle. “There it is, Smiley. All you have to do is come and get it.”

  Smiley’s heart wasn’t in it, but he did make the effort, and that got him a kick in the balls and he grabbed himself, screaming like a man gone out of his mind. Eastland lifted him and threw him against the wall and held him there with punches to the belly that prevented him from falling. Eastland beat him until there was hardly any strength left in his arms. Smiley crumpled to the floor and lay wheezing through his own blood. Spit was mixed with blood and a pink, frothy bubble formed between his lips and bobbed there for a moment before it broke. Smiley’s eyes were wide with terror: he knew he was about to die.

  Knowing this, Smiley began to pray in Spanish, the language of his youth. Eastland smiled his satisfaction. It was funny how the really bad boys always turned to Jesus in the end. He stood over Smiley and kicked him in the thigh muscles, temporarily crippling the legs so that he couldn’t get up and run away when he slid him down the stairs.

  After he dragged Smiley out by the hair, Eastland sent him down as carefully as he could. He didn’t want the lad to die on him after he had gone to so much trouble. Smiley made a snoring sound when he got to the bottom. Paco was a lot heavier than Smiley and Eastland was sweating like a bull by the time he got him out of the apartment.

  Ten minutes after that he had them on their backs in the basement. They lay with their hands and feet tied to ceiling supports, and to be certain they wouldn’t get loose he tightened the nylon cord until it dug into their flesh. It was too bad Shimmy couldn’t be there, but two out of three wasn’t bad.

  A rat ran at Eastland and he killed it with a kick. The dead rat dropped in the darkness and other rats tore it to pieces. Paco woke up and yelled when he discovered that he couldn’t move. The freak-faced goon was strong as a bull, but his weightlifter’s muscles were no match for parachute cord. Eastland knew what he was doing was monstrous, but monstrous deeds called for monstrous retribution. It was the worst death he could think of—to be eaten alive by starving rats; if there had been something even more horrible, he would have used it instead.

  Paco smelled the honey and heard the rats and screamed like a lost soul. Instead of praying he cursed in English and Spanish, spewing out all the bile of his rotten life. And then, his cursing done—Eastland smiled—Paco began to cry. The poor kid, Eastland thought. Never again would he rob and beat an old woman on her way home from the market. Sodomizing little girls on rooftops was something he would have to leave to others of his kind. Such simple pleasures as tormenting animals in the zoo were to be denied him forever. Eastland smiled again. It was just too bad about Paco.

  Eatland smeared Paco’s face and torso with honey; when he finished there was half a jar left for Smiley. When Smiley opened his eyes his tongue darted out to lick the honey at the corner of his mouth. Drawn by the smell of honey the rats were coming closer, and this time Eastland didn’t drive them away. A rat sprang at Smiley and sank its dirty fangs in his face. Holding the light, Eastland backed away while Smiley kept on screaming. Before he went upstairs he turned the light for one last look.

  But there were so many rats, he couldn’t see the bodies.

  The men from the local precinct were there when 1st Grade Detective James Dalton arrived with the uniformed captain. The car was unmarked and Dalton was driving. For a guy with clubhouse connections Captain Shea wasn’t such a bad cop, and Dalton could live with him when he had to. The two men got out of the car.

  There never was a good night in the South Bronx, but this one was worse than usual. Am ambulance and a police van were parked side by side with their doors open. A uniformed cop came out of 1501 carrying a color TV set.

  “Where’s O’Malley?” Captain Shea barked at the cop with the TV set. The captain had been a reserve major during the Korean War and he still acted like one.

  “Puking, sir,” the cop said.

  The captain looked outraged. “Puking! What do you mean—puking?”

  “What O’Malley saw made him sick, sir.” The cop was close enough to the van to put the TV set in with all the other stolen property recovered from the Ghouls’ clubhouse. “If you look in the ambulance you’ll see what I mean, sir. It was pretty bad here. Two of them were still alive when we got here. The rats had eaten away most of their faces. Somebody tied them down, poured honey over them, and left them for the rats.”

  “What about the one that got shot?” Captain Shea asked. “O’Malley called in and said one was shot.”

  “Some kind of automatic weapon,” the cop said. “Too soon to tell what it was.”

  “Jesus Christ! A sadist with an automatic weapon. It’s not bad enough around here. Now we have to get that.”

  “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch,” the cop said. “These Ghouls are savages. The guy who killed them left a note.”

  Captain Shea’s red face got redder. “Give it here and get lost,” he growled. “Next time don’t talk so much.”

  After Shea read the note he passed it to Dalton.

  The cop didn’t want to go away; Dalton guessed he was stupid, or didn’t know Shea. “The note claims the three dead guys were the ones that paralyzed Michael Jefferson. That’s the black guy we got the squeal on this afternoon Wait till the New York Post gets a hold of this.”

  “Fuck the New York Post!” Shea roared. The cop retreated hastily.

  “What do you think, Dalton?” Shea said. “You think maybe this is the beginning and end of this? Three spics get wasted isn’t such a big thing in this neighborhood. My guess is, somebody is using the Jefferson thing to co
ver up a revenge killing.”

  Dalton could see the captain was nervous, wanting to be reassured. The South Bronx was too much in the news, first with Jimmy Carter, who welched on his promise to rebuild the place. In Russia they showed the South Bronx on television—this is how America treats its minorities. The South Bronx was good copy.

  “It’s the way it was done that bothers me,” Dalton said. “If the guy had an automatic weapon, why didn’t he just gun them down instead of giving two of them to the rats? I think he planned the rat thing for all three, but one tried something and got shot. We can be sure of one thing: the killer planned far ahead.”

  Captain Shea said he’d see Dalton back at the station. “You check it out. There’s nothing I can do here.”

  The doors of the ambulance were open and Smiley and Shimmy were in it. Shimmy was dead so he got the floor. Blood still leaked from his body. Smiley didn’t have any face to smile with; Dalton was pretty sure the dying punk’s prints were on file. A guy like that would have a yellow sheet a yard long.

  The ambulance guys were bringing Paco out. Emergency Division floodlights lit up the whole area. Paco was heavy and the ambulance attendants grunted under his weight. Paco’s face was gone and so was a good part of his stomach.

  “Welcome to the Vincent Price movie,” one of the ambulance cowboys said to Dalton. He was a mean-faced little man of forty with grizzled red hair. “What’s the matter, Detective Dalton? You don’t look so good. Hey! Where are the press photographers? Kiss me—I’m photogenic. So are the Rat People.”

  “You’re a sick man, Ziggy,” Dalton said, knowing Ziggy was not to blame for the way he was. The rotten parts of the Big Apple—maybe it was all rotten—got to a man sooner or later.

  “A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,” Ziggy said in a very poor imitation of John Wayne going out to face the villianous enemy.

  “You’ll never beat out Rich Little,” Dalton said.

  “Sob,” Ziggy said.

  Upstairs the clubhouse was filled with police photographers and fingerprint men. Blood soaked the rug where Shimmy fell and the walls were pocked with bullet holes. Empty bottles were everywhere, some of them broken. Dalton had been in places with a worse stink; it was hard to think where. Flashbulbs popped and one of the fingerprint men whistled Lemon Tree as he worked.

  “Can you do Spanish Eyes, Roselli?” one of the photographers asked.

  “Sure,” Roselli said, and began to whistle Spanish Eyes.

  “Temper! Temper!” the photographer said when Dalton threw a half gallon wine jug through the paint-stuck window to let in some air. Dalton ignored him. Everybody who worked for the city was a comedian.

  The air that came in the broken window was only slightly better than the air in the apartment. A quiet plainclothes man handed Dalton a plastic bag containing ejected cartridge casings.

  “Not a print on any of them,” he said. “You know what they came from?”

  Dalton was turning the bag in the light. “Yeah,” he said with a sinking heart. “M-16’s. Army stuff. Maybe ballistics can match them to something.”

  In his mind Dalton saw the M-16 he had used in Nam, right to the last day of Kissinger’s war. This was the first time he had come across an M-16 outside of Nam. Every hoodlum would like to own one, but they were almost impossible to get. The few in circulation had been smuggled back by veterans or stolen Stateside. The veteran angle was worth following up.

  Looking around, Dalton didn’t think the print men would find anything. Ever since the TV crime shows began to show how it was done, it was getting harder and harder to catch killers. This particular killer was a methodical man; he wouldn’t trust himself to wipe off the prints he made. He’d wear gloves.

  Dalton picked up a pair of torn panties with a pencil. The panties and the empty bottles indicated that there had been a party in progress. How long ago? No way to tell. He was thinking it might have been any time when he found a full bottle of beer that had rolled into a corner. The bottle was still fairly cold, so the party had been recent. But where were the girls? There were no dead girls, so the killer wasn’t a psycho after all. Dalton tried to get a picture of the killer and failed. Maybe the girls hadn’t been there when the killer arrived. No, that wasn’t likely. The punks would never have a party without girls. So that meant the killer had chased them, that is, if he hadn’t taken them when he left.

  If the girls weren’t dead they knew what the killer looked like, and even if he’d been wearing something like a ski mask, they would have some idea of his height, build, coloring, the kind of voice he had. Maybe there was something he said that would narrow it down.

  There were three theories, in all. One: the murders and mutilations were the work of a rival gang, using the Jefferson case as a cover-up. Two: a sadist psycho was responsible. Three: a friend or relative of Michael Jefferson had done it. So far he had ruled out the sadist, because he hadn’t killed the girls. Dalton smiled wearily, a nice man doing a dirty job. He supposed there were sadists who liked girls. The gang killing idea just didn’t ring true—too elaborate. It would be an easy out for Captain Shea, except that Dalton was far from convinced that the killings would stop here.

  There was nothing more to see in the apartment. There were floodlights in the hall and in the basement. No rats ran around because of the lights; anyway, they had dined well. The cords that bound the Ghouls had been removed—nylon parachute cord, a cop said. That had a slightly military sound, but it didn’t have to mean anything. Still, the nylon cord and the M-16 did go together.

  The relative or close friend theory was the one Dalton liked best, even if it did suggest a man of great violence and ferocity. Who else would do such a terrible thing? A man so savage would have to have a history of mayhem, and a police record was more than likely. He knew about the Jefferson case but only from casual talk at the station. Now he had to know everything there was to know about Jefferson: his family, his friends, if he had served in the military, if he had a criminal record. It was going to take a lot of digging.

  Of course if one of the girls turned up dead, that didn’t mean she had been killed by the man with the M-16. All gang girls were whores—and whores got killed all the time. What Dalton feared most was that the thing at 1501 Simpson would set off a whole wave of killing. It had happened before. Every time some maniac threw a toddler off a roof, other small children followed right along. There was no way to keep it out of the tabloids; if they asked the tabloids to soft-pedal the story they would make it worse than it was. The tabloids liked to pretend they ran their scare stories as a public service, insisting that the public had a right to know. That was bullshit. Newspapers existed solely to make money, just like condom manufacturers, the only difference being that making rubbers was a worthwhile enterprise.

  Dalton got back outside just in time to catch two cops putting TV sets in the back of a patrol car instead of in the property van. They looked sheepish when they saw his face.

  “Hey Dalton,” one of them said. “You want a color portable, this year’s model—a Sony?”

  “Keep it,” Dalton said. “I only steal American.”

  Feeling depressed he went back to the station to start the long dig.

  CHAPTER 6

  While Dalton was phoning for a computer readout on Michael Jefferson, Eastland was moving his arsenal to another apartment, a small furnished place about two miles from where he lived. He got it through a newspaper ad, but the landlord said it wouldn’t be ready until the next day. Eastland said he needed it right away and, after some grumbling, the man said he could move in that evening. The rent was $350 a month, but the small apartment house was in a fairly good district—that cut down the chances of a break-in.

  If the cops came around he didn’t want to be sitting on a load of guns in his own place. He was sure they would come after they checked on all Michael’s “known associates,” which was cop talk for people he knew. There was no way to get out of talking to the cops unless he
took off and holed up. If he did that, then they’d know for sure. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to take care of Michael’s wife and kids.

  What he had to do was brazen it out, though “brazen” wasn’t the right word. He didn’t know how good a liar he was; he would keep it simple. Of course they wouldn’t accuse him of anything; first they would poke around in his life, ask questions at the market and other places. They would check his army record to see if he’d done any bad stuff in the States or in Nam. They would find nothing because there was nothing to find. There were no arrests, no police shit of any kind. In high school he had been an honor student. He was looking forward to working his way through college when Uncle said he needed him to kill gooks.

  The landlord was waiting when Eastland got there with the olive-green box. He took the subway part of the way, the rest by cab. The cops might check the taxi trip sheets for his neighborhood; this way there would be no record.

  The landlord, a fussy man with a bald head and a German accent, showed him into what he called his office, an alcove with a desk in it. The hall of the apartment house was clean and smelled of strong industrial soap. In his lapel the German was wearing a miniature American flag-pin.

  “You just get out of the army, jah?” the German said, eyeing the box.

  “Three hitches,” Eastland said, after the German wrote his name in the rent book—William McGill.

  “Vas you in Veet Nom?”

  “Yeah, I was over there.”

  “Vee could haff beat dem yellow gooks iff de politicians give us de chance. General LeMay”—the German gave the G in general a hard sound—“had the right idea. H-bomb dem gooks back into de stone age.”

  Eastland nodded. “That’s telling it,” he said.

  The German liked that and though he didn’t ask for references he did ask for a month’s security. The German put the money in a tin cashbox and locked it.