I jumped up like I was on fire. I had to run. There was nowhere to run, but that was the moment that the combat broke me. I couldn’t even think like a man anymore. The force guiding my legs to run belonged to an older, more primitive urge.
The men began to shout. “Higgins, get down!”
I couldn’t respond. Language wasn’t mine to use anymore. I felt hands pull at my pant legs, but these feelings just produced more fear. In my mind, they were the hands of the dead trying to pull me into hell.
More shots rang out—many—and I felt a bullet rip through the meat between my neck and my shoulder. My arm went hot and dead. More hot blood hit me in the face, only this time it was mine.
I instantly felt the loss of blood. My frantic steps stopped, and I fell to my knees. I felt like I had never felt anything else in my life before that, even the heavenly touch of my Doris. In a way, nothing had ever been more real than that gunshot, or more meaningful. In front of me, tracers zipped past my ears and burrowed holes into a tree. Strips of burning bark flew through the air like sparks. In that darkness it looked like a fireworks display. I was entranced, just … lost up there in my headspace. I threw my head back and cried.
Through a clearing, I caught the full moon in my eyes. The moon was pure white, save the spots of gray that dotted its pale and powdered face. I thought it was heaven, seeing that pearly moon fill the sky. I knew that somewhere, somehow, my Doris was looking at that same, plump moon, watching it with her beautiful blue eyes, wondering where I was, and hoping against all hope that I was safe.
In the blink of an eye, the moon turned from white to silver. My hysteria broke long enough for me to scream, because the pain of a thousand deaths had hit me. I saw my hand explode from the wrist down, and there was something else underneath it, but I didn’t know what. A moment later, I was gone.
I came back to the States not long after, not knowing what had happened that night, not knowing what to tell the brass about how I had survived the firefight. I thought I was crazy. They did too, which was why they sent me back.
I shouldn’t have come back. My father never should’ve had children. When he did have children, he should’ve killed the both of us. He should’ve lived one more day so I could’ve died in that moonlit jungle. I should’ve stayed down, or taken that round to the head for my friend Ritter. I never should’ve come home, because I never would’ve known guilt.
Alice walked out the front door and shuffled down the block toward her Honda. She got in, made a turn, and headed north toward home. I followed. It was just after four in the morning.
Once her front door closed behind her, I drove home, slept for a couple of hours, and got up a little after six to get ready for work myself. I was exhausted, but there was no rest for the wicked.
That night I would do the same thing all over again.
Midnight again on Carpenter Street.
With every car that pulled up to see one of the girls in the house, there was the possibility he was a sick and sadistic killer. I kept my eyes open for a car with out-of-state plates, but they all looked local to me. As far as I knew, there wasn’t even any proof that the Rose Killer had set foot in Mama Snow’s. He very well could have come upon Josie Jones on the street somewhere, or at a coffee shop, or a red light.
Too many variables. It had never been my fucking forte to consider variables. I was a broad-strokes kind of guy, and yes, I can admit it now, it all made my head hurt.
It occurred to me that instead of the killer being from out of town, he very well could have been a local man who traveled around the world to do his dirty work. In that case, he would have been working too close to home now, which means he would have snapped recently, not caring anymore if he got caught. Or maybe he was just plain crazy. Was there anyone in town who fit the bill?
As if lightning had struck me dead in the brain, I no longer saw the darkened street ahead of me, but the outside of a dilapidated house somewhere not far away. I was experiencing another one of Pearce’s memories….
Pearce approached the house slowly. Not because he was afraid—the resident wasn’t known to be especially violent—but because there was so much to take in. The resident’s lawn was painted green. Not a single blade of grass grew. It was literally all green paint thrown across the bare dirt.
Pearce laughed, and before knocking on the door with his big, hairless knuckles, he peeked in through one of the broken windows. He could see a room painted blue in the space between the curtains. Up on the wall was one of those ridiculous posters seen in schools all across the country—a little kitty cat hanging by its paws from a clothesline or some such thing. The caption read
“HANG IN THERE!”
Pearce sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy.
Just then, the sun broke out from behind a squadron of clouds, and whereas the room once shone to him through the window, it was now obscured. All he could see was his face in the reflection. He looked at himself and smiled, curious to see how young he looked just then, even though he seemed tired around the eyes.
How strange it is, how a man spends his life looking in a mirror, only to think he will be the only person to ever see what he sees.
I see it too, if I just so happen to kill you.
Pearce stepped back to the door to the house and hammered it with his fist. Immediately following that, he stepped to the side and rested his hand on the gun latched on to the side of his duty belt. If the tenant was crazy enough to start blazing away, Pearce didn’t want to get shot through the door. It’s what he was trained to do.
Several long seconds passed. Pearce was about to knock again when the door creaked open.
“Hey, Officer,” said Crazy Bob. “Everything okay?”
Crazy Bob was wearing a pair of dirty blue jeans and a wife beater. He was covered from head to toe in green paint. He was, needless to say, the guilty party. “Bob, right?”
“You got that right. What can I help you with?”
“Well,” said Pearce, “your neighbors thought I should come by to see how you’re feeling.”
“I feel marvelous,” said Crazy Bob. “Fantastic, even. Never better in my life.”
Pearce cleared his throat and stepped closer.
“We’ll see about that,” said Pearce.
As suddenly as I had been forced into another man’s memories, I found myself back behind the wheel on Carpenter Street. I lit another cigarette.
Before I knew what I was doing, I started the truck and was heading south. I knew where Crazy Bob lived. And they didn’t call him Crazy Bob because he was the most predictable motherfucker in the world, either.
Picture, if you will, all the times you’ve driven through a really nice neighborhood in your life. The kind of neighborhood where in the winter months the Christmas decorations outside the houses will be elaborate and expensive. Where in the summers, boats are parked in the driveways. Where, through the windows, you could see the people who live there have honest-to-God chandeliers in the house, like at a fucking opera house or something. Now picture on this beautiful, upscale kind of block a single house that looked like it had been strafed and bombed by a fleet of F-16s.
That would be Crazy Bob’s house. I passed it in the truck, saw there was a light on inside, kept driving, parked on the corner, and walked back.
Because of Pearce’s memories, I felt as if I’d already been there, but I never was. It was very dark, but I could see that there were some patches of grass growing up on his lawn—a drastic shift from when Pearce had visited the place years earlier. I walked over the lawn to the window that Pearce had once looked in. It was just around the side, and, coincidentally, it looked into the one room that was lit from the inside. I was shocked by what I saw through the curtains.
The room was painted bloodred, and a bare lightbulb hung from a wire in the cracked ceiling, swinging back and forth like that scene in Psycho. The kitty poster wasn’t on the wall anymore, and probably hadn’t been for some time, but instead th
ere was something in that room far more interesting.
Crazy Bob’s back was to me. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a dirty T-shirt. His beer gut hung over his pants like a threat. In his right hand was a six-gun. A Magnum, by the looks of it. I swallowed.
Seated before him was a naked woman coated with sweat. Her legs were long and her breasts were just short of gargantuan. One of them had a red dot on it. That was blood, which ran in a fine trickle from her heavy lower lip. She was blond, and had enough makeup on to be mistaken for a member of Kiss. Regardless, it was apparent that the woman needed some saving from this madman. I would not let another woman die by this monster’s hand. I presumed those were her clothes littered about the floor, only because they were surely too small for our friend Bob.
I had not anticipated anything actually going down when I swung by the lunatic’s house. I merely wanted to do some recon. This, however, was not going to be recon. I wished I had brought a disguise, but then I figured it probably didn’t matter. The chances were fair that no one was going to make it out of that house alive anyway.
I snuck to the back of the house. There was a door back there that led into the kitchen. I jiggled the doorknob, and the door opened silently. I breathed in deep and stepped in.
The stench hit me first—the smell of roaches. Then I heard Crazy Bob—thought to be harmless all these years—quoting scripture. Some business about the end times.
I slowly crept through the house. Mounds of plaster rested in the corners because the ceiling was caving in. I figured the house would collapse inside a year if it was left to its own devices. I could hear the woman breathing heavily.
I stopped at the open door to the red room.
Bob was calm, but I didn’t know how alert he was, or how quick he was with the six-gun. I wondered what it felt like to truly kill a man. I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out. Fuck it, I thought, and rushed him.
He didn’t see me coming. My right hook from hell sent him into the far wall, and he dropped the gun on the floor. The woman screamed. With Bob off balance, I drove a closed fist down into his gut, and he doubled up. I followed that up with some quick punches to the back of his neck, and then he was down. He didn’t even know what the fuck was going on. The heels of my cowboy boots did the job of knocking the motherfucker out cold. The woman screamed again.
I picked up the gun and trained it on the murderous sonofabitch on the floor.
“Stop!” the woman cried.
I turned to her. I had almost forgotten she was there.
“Are you okay?”
In retrospect, I guess it was pretty obvious. “No,” she said, “I am not okay! Don’t you dare shoot him! I love him.”
“What?”
“How could you do this to him?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know who this guy is?”
“He’s my husband,” the woman said. I lowered the gun. “Husband?”
“You killed my husband.”
“No, I didn’t. I almost did, but … I didn’t even know Crazy Bob was married.”
“He is. To me.”
This had not worked out the way I wanted it to.
“I thought … I thought he was the killer. I thought you were a captive.”
“He’s no killer. He’s harmless.”
It apparently didn’t matter to her that I was holding a loaded Magnum.
“This is how we roll,” she said. “And can you stop looking at my
tits?”
“Sorry.”
“You should be sorry.”
“I am,” I said. “I’ll just … I’ll let myself out.”
I had obviously made a horrible mistake—I seemed to be getting good at that. I had been so sure that I had been witnessing the murder of another innocent person, but it turned out to be, well, the way Crazy Bob liked to roll with his old lady.
“By the way,” I said, “where was the wedding?”
“There wasn’t one,” the woman cried. “We’re married in the eyes of the Lord.”
“Okay. How long?”
She thought for a second, then asked, “What day is it?” I hesitated before saying anything—just for comedic effect, because what else could I do—then said, “Forget I asked.” I snuck back out the back door and took the gun with me. Alice got home safe that night.
That was all very stupid of me, I admit that, but my heart was in the right place. I could only hope that Crazy Bob was crazy enough not to contact the law about my little bit of business with him. At least he was eliminated as a suspect in my eyes.
The next morning, there was an article in the paper that said a person of interest had been arrested the night before. I was giddy with joy; but by that evening my hopes had been squashed.
The police had picked up a bum in Applegate Park. They didn’t know who he was—he was one of these fellows who must have come into town on one of the freight trains—and they had found a bloody knife in his possession.
After what must have been a heated interrogation, the man admitted that what was on the knife was blood, but it belonged to a dog. He had killed one to eat. In his mind, he was performing a public service and getting himself fed at the same time. He led the police to the animal’s remains, and his story must have checked out because by nightfall he was no longer a person of interest, but he had been placed in Bonham’s—the hospital for the mentally degraded that rested far to the northwest and looked about as cheery as a tombstone.
Several days came and went with no good luck for anyone. The killer was still out there, and the only consolation was that no other bodies had turned up. Alice came and went from work under my watchful guard every night, but in my mind the temperature was rising, and it wasn’t just because the summer was upon us. There were ten days left until the next full moon filled the sky. Ten days left for the police to do their job. Ten days for me to find a needle in a haystack. Ten days left before someone died.
SIXTEEN
On the night of the thirty-first, Alice got to work at the same time as always, and, as usual, wasn’t visible to me in my truck until the time she stepped out the front door just after four in the morning. The streets were dead. You couldn’t even hear the crickets.
Alice said good night to Leon at the door, shuffled down the steps, and made a left at the curb. Her Honda was not parked on the block. In fact, it was parked two full blocks down. When she got to work that evening, there were several spaces she could have taken, but chose not to. I don’t know why. I could only presume that Mama Snow didn’t want so many cars on the block anymore. Maybe the police were giving her hell since Josie Jones died.
I was parked in my usual spot at the far end of the block, and I had a clear view of everything ahead of me. Alice was walking away from me on the opposite side of the street. Leon, instead of going back into the house right away, kind of watched her as she went down the block. I have to presume that he and I both saw the same thing at the same time.
At first it was nothing more than a shaking bush. Seconds later, a man in dark clothing emerged. Alice had passed the spot where he now stood just a few moments earlier, and was about twenty paces ahead of him. The man in black stood still on the sidewalk and watched her. Then he started to walk toward her.
I got out of the truck and closed the door just enough so no one would notice that it hadn’t locked. I didn’t make a sound. With Crazy Bob’s Magnum at my side, I rushed down the block.
Leon was doing the same thing, except he was such a hellish creation that he didn’t need a weapon—his pan-sized hands were practically designed by Reagan’s Star Wars program. Leon saw me across the street and stopped in his tracks. He must have seen the gun in my hand. I held out my hand for him to stop and then waved him back into the house. I didn’t want any witnesses. He wrinkled his brow, then nodded and went back to the house. He knew what I was doing.
I crossed the street silently. I tucked the gun into my pants. Up ahead, I could hear Alice’s high heels clacking
on the sidewalk. She was oblivious to the man on her trail, and he was oblivious to me as I came up behind him, grabbed him by the collar, and punched him as hard as I could in the stomach. A rush of drunk air belched forth from his mouth, and he fell onto the closely cropped front lawn of a beautiful house. I knelt in front of him and raised the gun to his head. His eyes were crossed as they focused on the long barrel, the night-light shining off of it. I raised a finger to my lips.
“Shhh.”
I heard Alice’s footsteps halt as I knew they would. She had heard the man get hit. She must have turned, but saw nothing—the man and I were hidden from view by tall bushes. Soon, she went back to walking.
I waved the gun.
“Get up,” I whispered.
The man was my age, and disheveled. His dark clothes were filthy, and a slight beard hid a weak chin. He reeked of alcohol. “Why did you hit me?”
“Shut up,” I said. “Get up and walk.”
The man got up slowly, his eyes not once leaving the gun, and then I pointed toward the backyard with my finger. He walked. I walked behind him, the gun in his back.
I couldn’t tell you which one of us was sweating more, him or me. My heart was racing like a greyhound, I was so nervous. I had waited so long for so many nights, hoping and praying for the man of my dreams to appear from the ether, and here he was right in front of me. I couldn’t believe my luck.
As we snuck around to the back of the house, I wondered what it would be like to truly kill a man, to wrap my finger around the trigger of the gun, to pull the trigger that sent the bullet through this man’s organs. Would he scream when he died, or would it be so quick for him that he wouldn’t even have time to think of all the women he’d killed? Would he willingly tell me what I needed to hear—what kind of hoodoo bullshit he had been involved in to make him untraceable not only to the fuzz, but to the wolf—or would I have to beat him to know what I needed to know?
The man’s hands were shaking at his sides. I could see that even in the dim light. I’m sure he wasn’t used to dealing with armed men, just defenseless women.
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