Eight months before the federales believed the Rose Killer spree started, he killed his first victim. It was a woman he picked up at a bar in Los Angeles. He’d bought her a few drinks so he could get her home. When they got to his apartment and the clothes came off, she laughed at his legs because the skin up to his thighs was red, as if constantly embarrassed.
He choked her. He didn’t mean to. He had drunk just as much as she had, but the anger that always rested in the pit of his stomach like a molten ball suddenly flared to life, and he couldn’t control himself. Immediately after, he broke down and wept. He couldn’t believe what he had done. There was regret, but not for her. It was for him, should he ever get caught. Psychopaths do feel remorse, just not for others.
He checked her pulse, and was able to detect a faint heartbeat. He knew that if he brought her to a hospital, she would have him arrested. Then what would happen? He felt his only option was to make sure she never told, so he loaded her up in his car and drove west, to the water. When he found himself on a quiet block, the only witness the moon in the sky, he dragged her out of the car and stabbed her in the heart.
He became so consumed with worry about being caught that he started fucking up at work—he worked at a photo development lab in a menial position—and he got fired. It was then, with no more income, fear of losing his home, the life he had built for himself, that he killed another, and another, and another. Soon, there was no turning back.
The name he lived under on the road—Anthony Mannuzza—was the name of the cop who’d arrested him for disorderly conduct just days after he’d killed his first victim.
It was a woman who had burned him, a woman who had gotten him burned in the first place. It was women that always found his legs repulsive, no matter what kind of hairstyle he had, or how nice his clothes were. With all the blood on his hands, he had nothing left to lose, except his life, and that’s where I came in.
When I woke up, sunlight was coming down. The air moved in a gentle breeze, carrying the scents of flowers and honey. The birds were singing, as if the world were perfect. It wasn’t, but it was just a little bit better than it had been the night before.
My limbs were covered in dried blood, and as I stretched out naked in the tall grass, it chipped off like a layer of skin. I breathed in deep, coughed, and then smiled. I got up off the ground, using the tree as support. Once I was on my feet, I realized which tree it was. There, carved into it at shoulder level, were the names Johnny and June, surrounded by a carved-out heart. In the upper right corner of the heart was a hole. That was where my shot from the rifle had ended up. Ten yards past the tree was the shack, its one window blasted out, and its door slightly ajar. I walked over.
The wood door cried on its hinges, revealing a ten-by-ten room completely painted in blood. It was on the floor, the walls, the ceiling. It was so thick in some places that it had seemed to dry in layers—dry at the bottom and wet at the top. The photos along the walls were ruined, but there was a bag in the corner that I hadn’t noticed the night before. It was probably loaded with photographs that had made it safely through the crimson rain. I went over and opened it, and sure enough, it was. Bundles of photographs. I didn’t want to look at them, and I didn’t have to. Everything the Rose Killer had ever done was in my head now, and would be until the day I died.
I stacked the pictures on a fairly dry spot on the floor, being sure not to leave big, bloody fingerprints on the edges, and took the bag. I would need it. Next, I righted the chair I had been tied to the night before and set the bag on it.
Shredded meat littered the floor like confetti, maybe a third of what it would take to make a man. Resting in the far corner, one stacked on top of the other, were a pair of human legs, untouched, as if the wolf had wanted no part of them.
A fly landed on my hand. I blew it away. “Come back later,” I said.
I rummaged through the ankle-high mess and came up with the keys to my house, but that wasn’t all I was looking for. There were some things in that room that I needed to take with me—the definite signs that I had ever been there in the first place.
I picked up the bloodied clothes that had burst off of me the night before and found my skull-and-crossbones belt buckle under my torn-up pair of jeans. It was caked in blood, but still in one piece. I’d had the belt buckle for years, and truly dug it. It was coming with me. Everything else was reduced to rags. Everything went in the bag, like the busted handcuffs and my wallet and the pictures I’d carried around so long in my back pocket, but not the rifle, which went over my shoulder. I took the tape out of the video camera. It had been a long time since I’d seen a good show.
Last, I found John Raynor’s torn pair of pants and went through the pockets. God was smiling down on me, because his cigarettes were dry. I lit one up, and then fished out his car keys.
I ran across Old Sherman Road in all my naked glory and got in the Mach 1, then drove it as deep into the woods as I could. I emptied out the trunk and everything from the backseat, and dropped it all just outside the shack. When I was done, I used my old pair of underwear to wipe down the doorframe and anything else I might have touched. My blood was technically all over the place, but there was nothing I could do about that.
Having everything in one spot was my good deed for the federales. I was only sorry I couldn’t wrap a bow around the whole fucking building. I lit another cigarette, got in the car, and took
off.
I got home just short of six o’clock in the morning. I was half expecting to see a cruiser parked outside the place, but the coast was clear.
I made a pot of coffee and jumped in the shower to wash away the blood. As I combed my hair in front of the mirror, I touched my chest. The night before there had been two bullet holes in it. Not anymore. I wondered where the bullets went.
Over a bowl of cereal, I watched the tape that John Raynor had filmed the night before. When the strip of old rug came off the window, I saw myself change. I’d never seen it before. Now I was not only seeing it on film but I was reliving the Rose Killer’s perception of it as well. I wasn’t just getting a show; I was getting a double feature.
Anthony got off the floor as the wolf took its first lumbering steps toward him, and he tried once again in vain with the latch on the door. The wolf threw a clubbing blow into his back, and he doubled up. The camera tipped over. The wolf then swatted him against the wall, and he sank to his knees. As he screamed, the wolf pinned his arms against his chest and proceeded to gnaw slowly at Anthony’s face.
Before long, the killer passed out, and it was at that point, in which he no longer had a face to enchant with, in which his eyes hung like shining ornaments from their ruined sockets, in which he was no longer responsive to pain but lost somewhere up in his primordial brain someplace just short of death, that the wolf went on and took him apart.
Once he was dead and scattered about like the rags of my clothes, the wolf sauntered up to the camera, crouched down, and looked into the lens. With a deep breath it fogged up the lens, then roared, as if to say, “There you go.”
It then raised its hand beyond the scope of the camera’s eye, and turned the machine off. Watching that, I smiled. It was good to be a team again. But I destroyed the tape all the same.
After I finished my cereal and coffee, I put the bowl and mug in the sink. I would not have the chance to wash them. I went through the house gathering up my most treasured possessions—Doris’s night-light, the one picture of her I had left, the eagle feather my mother had given me and which was my burden to carry for the rest of my days, my old leather jacket, the naked-lady ashtray, clothes, the Proust I hadn’t finished reading—and loaded the trunk with them, then put the trunk in the backseat of the car. There was nothing else in the world I possessed.
I dressed in a clean set of clothes—jeans, cowboy boots, and an old flannel shirt—and locked the door behind me. I no longer had a home. And I no longer had a name. It was time for me to disappear. It’s what I w
as good at.
I remember leaving home like it happened yesterday. I remember pounding on my mother’s front door, begging her to let me in. She finally did. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, not since I left in a huff and moved into that fleabag motel on the other side of town. Doris had come over to my room the night before with a travel bag. In a couple of days we were going to get on the bike and head out west toward the ocean. We were going to get married along the way.
My mother answered the door in her bathrobe, her graying hair up in a bun, bags under her eyes the color of bruises, like she hadn’t slept since I came back from the war. I was hysterical, shaking, crying, and she carried me over to the couch and sat me down.
In a calm voice, she asked me what happened. I told her. “Doris is dead,”
I said, weeping.
My mother lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“You blacked out, didn’t you?”
“How do you know?”
“By any chance,” she said, “did you see the full moon last night?”
I saw an image of hell flash across her eyes. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“Son,” she said, a tear sliding down her face, “you should have died over in that godforsaken war.”
“What was Dad supposed to tell me?”
She started it off with, “Well, Marlowe, you’re not like other boys,” and it went downhill from there.
She told me about my bloodline, how my great-grandfather had been a bounty hunter, how he had gone after an Indian who was called “the Mad Wolf.” The Indian was said to be deranged and possessed of supernatural powers. He had left whole villages in ruins. My great-grandfather killed the Indian, but his life was cursed from that day forward. When he died, his son inherited the curse. Down the line it went, till it got to me. She told me why Dad went away once a month the way he did—so he wouldn’t kill his family.
“Marlowe, the life you wanted could never be yours, even if Doris were still alive. Your father and I knew that because we went through the same thing. When you went to Vietnam, we were truly hoping you wouldn’t make it, just so you wouldn’t have to go through what he went through, and so Doris wouldn’t have to live the kind of life that I’ve had to live. That’s why we pushed her away. So she could move on. But it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”
“This can’t be happening,” I cried.
“You should have died overseas. Doris would still be here….”
“No. Doris is dead because of you. You instigated this whole damn thing. You drove me away. You didn’t warn me, Mom. You let us go.”
“Would you have believed me? I couldn’t … How could I say these things to my boy? It should have ended with your brother….”
“What do you mean?”
“Jeffrey didn’t die,” she said. “Your father killed him. Just took him out one night and didn’t come back with him. I didn’t want to know what he did. He was going to kill the both of you so it could end with him, but after he did your baby brother, he couldn’t go on and kill you too. He was too weak. He loved you too much. He loved Jeffrey too, but he thought the both of you would be able to go off together. He was supposed to tell you about the curse. But he couldn’t. He wanted to spare you this pain. You were supposed to die over there, Marlowe. Why didn’t you die?”
“Mom, this isn’t right….”
“It’s not,” she said. Then: “There’s only one right thing left to do. This has to end with you.”
She left the room and came back with my father’s loaded revolver. She handed it to me by the barrel. “Take it,” she said. “Do what needs to be done.”
I took the gun. It was heavy in my hand. Something inside me told me she was right. I should have just ended it, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve already died once. I don’t want to do it again.”
“There’s no hope, Marlowe, and there’s no cure. Believe me, your father tried. He really did. Wherever you go, death will follow. And it will never end.”
“We’ll see. There has to be someone out there who knows about this. Someone who can reverse it, somewhere. There has to be a cure. Someone who can help.”
“There’s no hope,” she said. “Your search will be futile and painful. But if that’s what you want to do, you’ll need this.”
She reached into her bathrobe and produced the eagle feather.
“It was the Indian’s. It’s the only thing that matters now.”
There was no kiss good-bye, no parting words. Her son was dead, or at least a very human part of him was, and in his place was a walking, talking pestilence. A plague. A bike-borne disease named Vicious Death. In the space that died was a doorway to hell that would never fully close.
“There’s no hope,” she repeated.
“We’ll see,” I replied defiantly as I passed through her doorway and out into the night. The next time I would see her, she would be dead.
I walked through the door of my childhood home for the last time and left my mother standing in the doorway. Later that night, my mother burned the motel down to the ground. Doris’s body was never found, and as far as her parents ever knew, we’d run off together, never to be seen again. They never knew what happened to their girl.
Strapped to the back of my bike was the bag that Doris had brought over. In it had been her clothes, some makeup, a couple of books, a small framed picture of her that she knew I couldn’t live without, and her night-light. The one with the clown’s head on it. The one she’d had since she was a little kid, the one she still had, because she was deathly afraid of the dark. They were the trinkets and charms of my Doris—the material objects that had meant so little to me the day before, but had now taken on such deep and abundant meanings because their existence was all I had left of our life together.
I had the clothes on my back and forty-eight dollars to my name. My useless name. A name that brought such astounding sorrow to the lives of those it touched, and, like a Pandora’s box, would do the same twenty years later when I thought I could bring it back out of the closet I’d hidden it in, polish it off, make it mean something, and use it again.
I got on the bike and I cried her name. “Doris, I’m so sorry.”
My life was no more. Nothing was left, save doom, and darkness, and bloody moons gorged ripe and red with horror. I was in hell, and from this hell, there seemed to be not a single escape, a saving refuge, a possible way out. But I couldn’t give up that easily. The war, the blood, my love—it couldn’t all have been for nothing. There had to be a cure. I had to try.
With that, I started the bike, and I was gone.
I got to Long John’s a little after seven in the morning. Abraham’s Buick was in one of the spaces. I hopped up the steps, went through the door, and heard the bell jangle above my head. Abraham was behind the counter, wiping it down with a cloth. “Mind if I come in?”
“Of course not,” said Abraham. “You owe me for that coffee.” I took a seat on one of the stools.
“How you doin’, Abe?”
“Pretty good,” he said. “How about you? Last time I saw you, you looked like you’d become intimate with an ugly stick.”
With the full moon come and gone, I was back in tip-top shape. I felt like a million bucks. But I probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred.
“I have a history of resiliency.”
“Got the recipe?”
“It’s a family secret,” I said. “Sorry. I just came by to tell you I’m skippin’ town, Abe. I’m outta here.”
“I kind of figured you would be.”
“I think I wore out my welcome these last few weeks. I gotta start over again. Somewhere fresh.”
“To be honest, you wore out your welcome the day you showed up.”
“I probably did,” I said.
“Is anybody going to be looking for you?”
“I hope not.”
“I ask because I see you have a new rid
e out there. I recognize that car. Is there anything I should know?”
“Nothing you need to know, except I’m not a bad guy, Abraham. Everything else you might hear on the news at some point.”
He went back to wiping the counter, then said, “But you’re not a bad guy.”
“That’s right.”
“In that case, you don’t owe me for the coffee.”
“Can I have another then?”
“Don’t push your luck,” he said. “Where are you off to?”
“I don’t know where I’m going.”
“Did you ever?”
“No, I guess not. It was nice working with you, Abe.”
“I wish I could say the same,” he said.
We shook hands, and the bell jangled behind me for the last time.
The hatchback pulled into the parking lot, all clean and shiny, and he came to a stop in the same place it was in the last time. Van Buren killed the engine, undid his safety belt, and opened the door. I snuck up behind the car. My right hand was curled up in a pretty little fist of fury.
His brown leather shoes hit the asphalt. He must’ve heard a footstep, for he turned to me before I reached him. It didn’t matter though. My right hook knocked him down to the ground. His sunglasses flew away, revealing discolored eyes. I dropped to my knees and plucked the handgun out from the inside of his jacket before he knew which way was up, and I trained it to the side of his head.
“Higgins,” he said, shocked.
He licked a trickle of blood away from the corner of his mouth, and struggled a second to uncross his eyes. His face was still a patchwork of browns and blues from our skirmish in the woods. His nose was covered with a white strip.
“Surprised to see me?”
“How …”
“You tried to kill me,” I hissed. “That wasn’t very fucking nice.”
“Higgins …”
“You fucked up. People like you always do. If you’re going to try to kill a man, you do it right, like I do.”
The Wolfman Page 26
