He started moving shit around, and then opened this one box. It was full of eight-by-ten photographs of places around Evelyn. He started flipping through them, and then pulled a few out. They were the pictures of Pearce and me, the ones he had taken at the restaurant.
“Here,” he said, “you can have them if you like.”
I took them and flipped through them slowly. The shots were taken in rapid succession, and going through them was like going through a small flip-book. Pearce and I slowly giving the finger to the prettyboy cameraman. One of the last times either of us had smiled. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
“Don’t worry. I have doubles.”
I switched the pictures to my left hand, took a deep breath, and decked Anthony with my right hook. The shot sent him back into the side of the car, and he fell on his ass. A tear of blood leaked from his lower lip.
He shook his head, then looked up at me with an expression of pure rage. He looked like a different person, but the look was soon pacified, because he knew in that moment that anything he could possibly do would be futile.
I shook out my knuckles, then said, “Thanks for the drinks, but you had that one coming for those pictures no matter what.”
“Fuck you,” he grunted.
I lit a cigarette and walked back to my truck. I put the pictures on the passenger seat.
“We all have a job to do,” he shouted. “It’s nothing personal.”
I took off.
“We all have a job to do, nothing personal,” I said to myself. It sounded true, I thought, plowing into someone’s mailbox.
TWENTY
A loud banging woke me from my deep, drunken sleep. That was another reason I used to love to drink so much—it made the bad dreams go away. I was so out of it, my head went back down to the warm pillow, and I was out again.
Seconds or years later, I wasn’t sure which, the banging came back, and it was anger more than anything that gave me the motivation to get out of bed. Some motherfucker was at the door, and they were going to suffer for it. The skull-and-crossbones sticker wasn’t on my mailbox for nothing.
On the other hand, I thought I recalled leaving a puddle of vomit at the mailbox too, and that didn’t so much have any significance that I could think of, except letting people know I’m an idiot as they walk by.
I slipped on my pair of jeans, grabbed my baseball bat from the hallway closet, and went to the front door. I was barely able to walk straight. The pounding continued. My head felt like it was full of lead pellets. Buckshot.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
A male voice I couldn’t place said, “Open the door. Now.”
“Oh, I’ll open it, scumbag.”
I undid the chain and four locks, and as I ripped that door open, I raised the bat to shoulder level, aiming to score a homer with this bastard’s head.
It was a guy in a gray suit and polished shoes. Sunglasses. Short hair. A wedding band on his finger that he twirled without realizing it.
“Detective Van Buren,” he said. “Remember me?”
“I’ve tried not to,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
“You want to put that bat down?”
“No,” I said.
“I can make you.”
“Have it your own way.”
He didn’t make a move. He was smart.
“What the fuck do you want, cop? You woke me up.”
“It’s two-thirty in the afternoon, Higgins. What happened to your precious job serving gruel at that hellhole on Main Street?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“I won’t be doing that today,” he said, smirking.
“Is this what you came here for? To wake me up? To joust with me? I don’t have time for this shit.”
“I think you do,” he said. “I think you have plenty of time to talk to me.”
“Sorry, I don’t think I do.”
“We can do it here, or we can do it at the station.”
“Listen, son, I’ve been hearing that line longer than you’ve been alive, arright? Don’t give me that shit.”
“Listen, Higgins …”
“No, you listen, cop, I don’t know what you want, but you’re seriously fucking up the Zen-like flow of my day here, and you can’t really talk to a man when he’s holding a baseball bat, so get the hell off my porch.”
I went to slam the door in his face, but he put his foot in the doorway. The door bounced off of it and swung back open.
“You don’t have a porch,” Van Buren said.
“Oh, you’re cute,” I said, surprised at his audacity. “You must be handicapped, like, mentally, to pull that shit on me.”
“You scuffed my shoe, Mr. Higgins. I’m not happy with that.”
“Drop dead, lawman.”
“You’re going to hear me out whether you like it or not,” he said.
“I already don’t like it.”
“How about you let me in. We can talk like gentlemen.”
“I don’t think so. Move your foot and write me a letter. The building number’s on the door.”
I made a move like I was going to slam the door again, but his foot didn’t budge, and I wasn’t about to wail on a cop unless he swung first. So it seemed we were at an impasse, as Proust would say. I couldn’t crack his head open without feeling provoked, and he couldn’t come in or pull me out to talk to me unless he saw a table behind me covered in cocaine and plutonium. But why did he want to talk to me? Was it for something I’d done at some point? Something they suspected me of? Whatever it was, there wasn’t enough proof around for this cop to get too fresh with me.
“Arright,” I said, “I have a serious fucking headache, man.
What’s it going to take for you to go away?”
“A few minutes of your time.”
“Is this about the other night?”
“Not quite….”
“The Indian?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Let me in.”
“Fine, you fucking …”
“Now lose the bat.”
I turned and threw the bat back into the house. It landed on the couch, bounced, then rolled across the floor. I turned back to the cop.
“Happy, asshole?”
“Yes,” he said.
He looked like he was about a hundred and sixty pounds. A lightweight. Grandmothers would describe him as “slight.” If I’d ever seen him on the street, I’d have dismissed him as a twerp.
In the blink of an eye, this little bastard bum-rushed me, right in my own home, and I let him do it by ditching that damn bat. One of his hands came up quick and locked around my face. The other hand pressed into my sternum, and he ran into me and pushed me all the way back into the house. We fell into the recliner, and the recliner tipped back and over. When the dust cleared, the cop was still on top of me, and he’d somehow slipped a pair of meat hooks on me.
“You fucker,” I hissed. “Get these fucking things off of me. Now.”
“I told you I’d make you lose the bat,” he said, smiling. “Idiots like you always think the same. They expect violence because that’s all they know. How to be a goddamn brute. It’s that limitation that makes you all so fucking stupid.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s why criminals get caught.”
“Get these cuffs off me.”
“And that’s why scumbags like you always make a mistake.”
“I’m going to have your fucking shield for this, man. What the fuck is this about? What are you talking about?”
He got up, put his foot on my chest as if I were a big game trophy and someone was about to take a picture. “Pearce was my partner, Higgins.”
“Good for you!” I yelled. “What do you want? A medal?”
“We worked together for a long time.”
“This is police brutality, man.”
“That’s what this is about,” he said. “About Pearce.”
I forced myself
to calm down a little, then said, “Fine.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good. Can I get off the fucking floor now?”
“No.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Well, fuck you, cop. You come in here, you wake me up, you attack me, you break into my home and take me fucking hostage. And now I can’t even smoke in my own home. That’s it, man. It’s on.”
He came down fast and wrapped a hand around my throat. “Shut up, you fucking worm,” he grumbled. “This isn’t your home no more, you hear me? Now shut up. You say one more word, I’ll bury that bat in your butt.”
I couldn’t answer him because he was strangling me. It was probably for the best.
“Pearce was my partner, but more than that, he was my friend.
He was my little kid’s godfather. Why? Because he was a good man. The best man in this goddamn town. I know that. Everyone that ever met him knew that. In another day and age, he would’ve been the one to nail Capone or some shit like that. He was a good man and a good cop. And now he’s dead. So I have to ask myself, if he was such a great guy, what was he doing spending time with a piece of trash like you?”
He eased up on my throat long enough for me to hack out, “Baking cookies.”
A slap across the left side of my face stunned me.
“Marlowe Higgins. I pulled your record, you know. You’re not an upstanding citizen, but there have been worse. But scumbags like you are sneaky, like worms.” He got up off me and set up the recliner. Took a seat in it. “It alarms me that there are so many gaps in your activity. So many years without paying your taxes and whatnot, without having a residence, a paper trail. What were you doing?”
“I was going door to door for the Mormons.”
“I always wondered what Pearce was doing, wasting his time with a piece of trash like you. When he told me, uh, quite a while back that you and he were acquaintances, I honestly thought he was full of shit, because, hey, everyone on the force had heard of you. You’re the guy with the mean right hook, right?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” I said.
“I followed him one night. Again, no time recently, but quite a while ago. I couldn’t even tell you when. And when I followed him, he drove right to that shitty little diner you got fired from …”
“It ain’t a fucking diner, man….”
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up already, Higgins. You’ll have your time to talk, and with any luck, it’ll be from behind bars or over a fucking hole dug for you. He drove to that shitty diner, and, hell, he actually ordered a cup of that muck you people call coffee, and he talked to you. I could not believe what I was seeing. I have to admit, it got me worried, my partner socializing with a connie like you. Goddamn, I was worried he was taking drugs out of evidence for you, but guess what’s missing from your rap sheet?”
“Rhymes?”
“Drug charges.”
“That too.”
“Seeing that made me happy, and I thought nothing of it, this weird association of his, that is, until this Rose Killer came to town.”
Hearing that made my skin crawl. “Now listen up, cop, if you think …”
He moved like a cat, and before I knew it his foot was pressed into the side of my face. “What part of ‘shut up’ are you having a hard time with?”
I groaned from the pain. After a few seconds he got off me and sat back down.
“From a crime scene like the one up at the Crowley property, you’d think a guy might call his wife, or his special lady, just to tell her he may not be home for a while. That’s what any man would do, especially when you have federal agents crawling in and out of your asshole, and that’s what Pearce had done a million times at crime scenes. But what did he do when they found that poor woman up there? He called you. Why is that?”
“Oh, you mean I can talk now?”
“Briefly, yes.”
“Well, it seems that our good buddy Pearce liked bouncing his cases off me. I think he felt better talking to me than you because I had a better relationship with your wife than you did.”
Detective Van Buren turned red, which made me happy on the inside.
“Maybe you should have tried following her,” I said. “You sonofabitch!”
He jumped up again, toward me, and this time he reached inside his jacket. Out came the police-issued handgun. He grabbed a fistful of my long, flowing hair with one hand and pressed the barrel of the gun into the side of my nose.
“Do it,” I said. “Do it.”
“It’s not over, you piece of trash. They may have put my friend in the ground. We may be in the middle of nowhere, with all kinds of creatures doing God knows what out in those woods, but you mark my words. I will not rest until you’re the one in a cage. I don’t trust you. And I don’t know what Pearce was involved with you for, but I will not allow his memory to be tarnished by whatever the fuck you two had going on. I don’t know why he called you from the crime scene, but if you had anything to do with that murder, I’m going to find out about it. Why? Because you’re a fuckup. You’re all fuckups, and I’m better than you. And when that time comes, when I find what I’m looking for, enough to put you away, you’ll have nowhere to run to, and nowhere on this fucking earth to hide. Do you understand that, man?”
“Do it now.”
“Don’t be so greedy, Higgins. Your time will come. And then it will be over.”
He got up and put the piece back in the holster under his jacket.
“You’re the one that’s been calling me, aren’t you?” He smiled.
“I knew it,” I said. “You’re a twisted sonofabitch, you know
that?”
“Let’s keep this little chat between you and me private, okay? If you go to my people, you’ll only be hurting yourself more, because I can guarantee they won’t listen to a word you have to say about this. And I’ll find out.”
“Figures.”
“Don’t make it hard for yourself. And remember, whatever you’ve done, you could always turn yourself in, save me the trouble of having to come down on you, because it’s only a matter of time.”
“Great.”
“You may be wondering what my motivation was, coming in here and showing you what a little connie you are, huh?”
“Not really. I kinda presumed you had the wrong house to begin with….”
“You’re a funny guy, you know that? Remember some of these lines when you’re in prison getting drilled up that hairy old ass of yours. But anyway, I’m here just to let you know that I’m going to get you. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it’s coming and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it. You bastards always fuck up, and I’ll be there when it happens. I just wanted you to know that. You’ve started saucing it up all over town, Higgins, getting into punching matches with all the lowlifes in this town, just like old times.”
“Hardly,” I said.
“Shut up. That tells me you’re weak, you’re already running from something up in that feeble old head of yours, and that tells me I won’t have to wait long to put those hooks on you again. I’m going to be watching you. Wherever you go, I’ll be over your shoulder. I’m going to be so close to you, I’ll be like cancer, practically inside you. And I’m going to break you.”
He turned and headed for the door.
“Hey!” I shouted.
He turned his head.
“Pearce was a good man,” I said. “The best man I ever met. It doesn’t mean anything to you, but I had nothing to do with anything. More important, neither did he.”
He said nothing, just turned his head back and went for the door.
“Hey!” I shouted again.
He stopped.
“What about these fucking handcuffs? Get these fucking things off me.”
He fished around in his pants pocket until he came up with the key. He held it up to the light, let it glisten.
“This goddam
n Rose Killer has to be stopped,” he said. “I don’t know where he came from or where he’s going. I don’t know if what’s been going on down here are copycat killings. The feds think it’s the real deal, though. The one thing I’m sure of is that the killer is still here.”
“How do you know that?”
“We found another body,” he said.
My mouth fell open on its hinges.
“I almost wish it was you, but I know where you were last night. In a way, it’s a shame,” he said, then threw the key at me. It landed by my feet. “But I’ll find out what your involvement is in all this. In regards to the handcuffs, get used to ‘em.”
“What exactly do you think I’ve done?”
He walked out as if I’d said nothing.
The TV confirmed what Van Buren had said. There was another body. Her name was Betsy Ratner. She was a teacher for second-grade kids at one of the local schools. She was twenty-eight years old. She was a single lady, though from the photos they showed she seemed to be a rather pretty girl with long dark hair and wide, innocent eyes. She had gone out with some of her girlfriends last night, and drove home somewhere in the neighborhood of two o’clock in the morning. She was inebriated, but comfortable enough to drive home alone.
Shortly after two o’clock in the morning, her car rolled down her driveway, went across the street at a speed of five miles an hour or so, and went into a car parked across the street, which set off the alarm. The police were called, and when they arrived they saw that the driver’s-side door to Betsy Ratner’s car was hanging open. There was a spot of blood on the driver’s seat, and several more drops on her driveway, but no Betsy Ratner.
Her body was found at the crack of dawn in Wild Oaks Cemetery, naked and posed on Detective Daniel Casey Pearce’s grave. Two wild, red roses were stuffed into her hollow sockets.
This murder was different from the Rose Killer’s previous kills for several reasons. Right off the bat, the evidence pointed to a blitz attack, hence the blood on the driveway and the unsubstantiated report that a bloody log was found in the bushes outside the house. He must have knocked her out in a hurry. All previous evidence pointed to mutilation occurring postmortem. Differing from other instances, the body was found in a matter of hours instead of days. This in itself was an oddity. It was as if the killer hadn’t been as methodical as he usually was, didn’t take as much time as usual. I reckoned this incident was much more impulsive than those in the past. There was a more urgent need for him to do what he did than was typical. Because of this rushed feeling to the crime, it felt much more sloppy than it ever had.
The Wolfman Page 20
