Smoke

by Joe Ide

  EX

  Ava was upset about Shareen, but what could she do? Tell the police Crowe had killed his wife even though she hadn’t seen it? Even if the police believed her, she couldn’t take them on a path through the woods because there was no path. She’d heard a scream but didn’t know where it came from. Then she’d have to explain how she found out about Crowe in the first place, and why she knew so much and where she got the information and Shareen would still be dead. She’d tell the police later, she decided. She talked with Billy on the phone.

  “Crowe’s destination is Coronado Springs,” Billy said. “He’s coming here to kill someone.” She wanted to ask him for more details, but she’d get them later. She had to get some rest, shower, change her clothes. Billy said he was staying at his friend Isaiah’s house.

  “Who’s Isaiah?” she asked. She didn’t like this, more people knowing what they were up to.

  “He’s a good guy, you’ll see,” Billy said. He gave her the address. He started to say more, but she said they’d talk when she got there. She ended the call. She wanted to get on with the mission. She drove faster.

  Crowe entered town on Coronado Boulevard. He drove two blocks, took a right, made a U-turn and parked. He was facing Coronado. He’d wait here for the girl. She’d go right by him. In less than ten minutes, she drove past in the Spark. He followed her to the Treeline Motel, a dump but it was probably cheap.

  “Lucky me,” Crowe said. Warren’s car was in the same parking lot, in front of 103. The girl’s was in front of 105. She was getting things out of her trunk. Yup. It was her, blue cap just like the girl at the gas station. Mmm, juicy, Crowe thought. Wait a second. He recognized her! It was their last victim, Hannah something. How could she still be alive? No, wait. She had a twin sister. Crowe had seen her on TV saying shitty things about him. He couldn’t remember her name. He watched how she moved and felt the need like heat from a blast furnace.

  Warren came out of his room, looking like he always did. Gaunt, stupid and half in the bag. He was scrawny, his chest concave, his shoulders hunched the way people do when they don’t want to be seen. Yeah, that works. Warren reminded Crowe of that guy who played George McFly in Back to the Future. Crispy something, except Crispy’s face wasn’t sweaty, his eyes weren’t bugged out, and he didn’t look insane.

  Warren glanced and then stared at the girl. “Don’t do it,” Crowe said aloud. Will the crazy fucker drag her into his room? There were people around, the cops would come. It would be a disaster. Warren walked away. Crowe blew out a stream of air like he was cooling his coffee. He wondered how the girl had gotten onto him in the first place. Pretty ballsy, following him all the way from Sac Town.

  If the girl wanted him arrested, she’d have called the cops by now. What was she after? he wondered. To hurt him? Catch him in the act? Kill him? If she’d made it this far, it was possible. He and Warren had murdered her sister after all. Crowe wouldn’t give a shit if somebody killed Warren, but it takes all kinds. He smiled. This was working out better than he thought. He had to kill the girl for practical reasons, and he could satisfy his fantasies at the same time.

  Crowe always heard his fantasies before they took over. It began with a single note, someone humming and holding it, growing in intensity and volume until it oscillated the air like a tuning fork, shifting into a monk’s drone, nasal and monotonous, the pitch rising higher and higher, stretching into a keening so sharp it pierced your skull, splintering into a squall, hissing and raspy, getting louder, ever louder, until you saw them, your fantasies, charging out of the blackness, a horde of screaming chimpanzees with bloody eyes and bloody teeth riding eyeless horses with dead women in their mouths. The monk was droning.

  Warren was watching TV and eating the shittiest pizza he’d ever had. He wanted to take it back and make the kid behind the counter choke on it. How did people live out here with all the fucking trees and shitty pizza? He was out of beer and would have to get some more. The drapes were closed. They held in the smell. Mold, bleach and BO. He only had dirty clothes, and they were scattered all over the floor.

  This morning, he’d followed EX from the house to the office. It took everything he had not to ram that fucking Subaru broadside. He’d seen the daughter too. Juicy, as Crowe would say. He’d do the daughter first and make EX watch.

  Crowe and Warren had different fathers, men who probably parked their eighteen-wheelers at the Road Stops Here truck stop, conveniently located where Interstate 5 meets 80, the main arteries into and out of Sacramento. They probably took advantage of their mother’s fire-sale prices and quick service. She killed herself when the two boys were in middle school. They were bounced around to different foster homes and institutions, eventually losing track of each other.

  When Warren turned eighteen, he was no longer the state’s responsibility. He did a little of everything to get by. He dealt meth and Oxy, robbed people, broke into houses, stole cars and burglarized stores. He lived in his sister’s basement. She wouldn’t allow him into the house. There was nothing there except a water heater, piles of junk and a cot, not even a microwave or a TV. Almost everything he ate came out of a bag or a box. He watched TV at Tango’s, a bar near the house, but after a while he quit going. His neck hurt from looking up and half the time it was a soccer game. He was in and out of prison. This was his life, and he never expected more.

  Warren turned thirty-four when he made the biggest mistake of his life. He’d gone to Tahoe to gamble, and predictably, he lost everything. He was heading back to Sacramento and stopped in Coronado Springs for a burger. He saw a girl in the parking lot. He grabbed her, dragged her into his car and assaulted her. He was caught, arrested and tried in the county courthouse. According to Warren, EX “destroyed” him. Ask him how this happened and his answers made no sense. The screaming didn’t help and neither did the drugs.

  They shipped him off to San Quentin where he reunited with Crowe. Crowe was big, violent, and he didn’t back down, qualities that earned you a lot of respect among the inmates. He kept Warren safe, but it almost wasn’t worth it. Since they’d last seen each other, Crowe had become more of an asshole than he was when they were kids. Bragging, telling whoppers, putting you down, threatening.

  “Give me shit, okay, Warren?” he would say. “And I’ll turn you over to the niggers.”

  Crowe was released first. He rented a house—no, not a house, a shack with holes in the floor, newspaper taped on the windows and no hot water. Crowe worked at a garage changing tires and he sold meth on the side. When Warren got out, they lived together. It was a parole violation, but their parole officers had too many clients to stop by. Warren’s PO said she had over a hundred.

  Warren knew Crowe was into something bad, but he didn’t know how bad until they were roomies. Some whore had rejected him, laughed at him, called him a creep and a psycho. Crowe went fucking ballistic. Like insane ballistic. Stomping all over the house, breaking shit and yelling about ripping the bitch’s head off and eating her tongue. Crowe asked Warren for help, hinting that if he refused, he’d get thrown out. Why not? Warren thought. He didn’t mind seeing women getting beat up. He’d beaten up a few himself. The whore’s name was Dixie. She was skinny with sunken cheeks, a brass-colored wig and a mean face. Crowe always said he had “high standards” for whores. What a laugh.

  Warren pretended to be a john and got Dixie into the car. As they were driving, Crowe popped up in the backseat and grinned at her in the rearview mirror. The bitch screamed, but Crowe put the Bowie to her throat and told her to shut up.

  The car was a junker. Crowe said it was cheap and it ran okay. He said he used it for this and nothing else. Warren wondered what “this” was. Crowe said it was one of his safety precautions. All the evidence would be in this car and not the one he drove every day. Evidence? Warren thought. Evidence of what? He realized Crowe wasn’t going to beat the girl up. He was going to kill her. Warren’s pulse sped up, his mouth was dry.

  Crowe told him t
o drive to the highway.

  “Where are we going?” Warren said.

  “To the place,” Crowe said, like it was holy or something. The place? Warren thought. What place?

  They drove way out into the desert somewhere, and now they were off road. The girl knew she was in deep shit. She was crying softly, saying something to herself.

  The “place” was nothing but a rusty, beat-up trailer parked in a deep arroyo. It was behind a hill so you couldn’t see it from the highway even if the lights were on. It had a generator and running water from a tank you had to fill every once in a while. Crowe said you needed water to clean yourself up. The woman was lying in the dirt, not moving, murmuring something to herself. Oh, shit, Warren thought. This was going to be fucked up.

  Crowe brought out his tackle box. His knives were in there. The first time Warren saw them he whistled like they were a girl with a big ass. There were two of them. They were gigantic, something you’d throw at a whale or hack into a fort with. Crowe told Warren about them. It was just after Warren had moved in. He remembered because it was the one and only time Crowe had said something interesting.

  They were in the shack, sitting on the cushionless couch watching a hockey game. Neither of them knew shit about hockey, but they had nothing else to do. Crowe was sharpening one of his “beauties” on a gray whetstone. He spit on the stone first, saying it worked better than water. Warren wondered what “better” meant. The spit was slimy and yellowish because they’d eaten mac and cheese out of a box. Crowe drew the blade back and forth across the stone, applying a little pressure with his off hand. He said the angle was important, twenty degrees was best. Warren wondered if he was making that up.

  “This is a Bowie knife,” Crowe said it like he was a tour guide. “It was named after a man named Jim Bowie, a famous knife fighter that died at the Alamo. He didn’t invent the knife, it was around long before him.”

  “Then why did they name it after him?” Warren said. Crowe gave him a look. Questions were not appreciated. He continued. “This is back in Louisiana, the 1800s. There was this famous fight, called the Sandbar Fight. Two families were warring over some land, so they met on a sandbar in the middle of the Mississippi River.” Warren was going to ask why, but Crowe interrupted him.

  “The sandbar was outside the jurisdiction of the law,” he said. “It was going be a duel and they had laws against dueling.” He said it like Warren was supposed to know about dueling laws a million fucking years ago.

  “Didn’t you just say it was a knife fight?” Warren asked. Crowe gave him that look again. He turned the Bowie around in his hand. He went on. “So the families and their supporters met out there, fifteen, eighteen people, something like that. Bowie was there to back up one of the families. The two leaders had their duel, but they were too far away and missed each other. Twice.”

  Warren chuckled. “What a bunch of idiots. What happened after that?”

  “They shook hands, okay?” Crowe said, copping an attitude. “Is that what you wanted to know? They shook hands. Are you satisfied now?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Crowe continued. “Well, the two sides were still pissed at each other, and they got into a brawl. Bowie charged into the middle of it, and a man from the other side shot him in the hip and knocked him down. But guess what?”

  “What?” Warren said. He wasn’t supposed to ask that either.

  “Fucking Bowie gets up and charges the guy!” Crowe said like it was the most amazing thing in the world.

  “Fucker had balls,” Warren conceded. Crowe shifted his shoulders around, sighed and went on.

  “Like I was saying. Bowie charges the guy who shot him, but the guy hits him with the gun and knocks him down again. And then a second guy shows up, shoots at Bowie but misses!”

  “And Bowie’s on the ground? Were all these guys cockeyed?” Warren said. Crowe hefted the knife like he was thinking of using it.

  “I’m getting to the good part,” he said through his teeth.

  “Fine, so what happened?” Warren said impatiently.

  “So then this guy, the second guy, draws a sword and stabs Bowie right in the fucking chest! But it didn’t go through because it hit his sternum. Right here.” Crowe put his finger on Warren’s sternum.

  “Fuck man, how lucky is that?” Warren said, batting the finger away.

  “Be quiet, okay?” Crowe was mad now. The asshole was so touchy. Crowe smiled and shook his head like Bowie was his kid or something. “But Bowie’s not done. He grabs this guy by the shirt, pulls him down on the knife and fucking kills him!”

  “Atta boy!” Warren hooted. “Go get ’em, Bowie!”

  “And then a third guy comes up behind Bowie and shoots him again!” Crowe said, laughing. “And you know what Bowie does?” He was grinning, like Warren would never guess.

  Warren blurted out, “He cuts the guy’s arm off?” Crowe went still. He looked like a soccer ball with no air in it. He looked like he’d dropped his birthday cake. He held the knife in the stabbing position. His jawbone was moving around. “Yes,” he said stiffly. “Bowie cut the guy’s arm off.”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” Warren said, bouncing up and down. He couldn’t remember the last time he knew an answer ahead of time. “Did the guy die? The guy who got his arm cut off?” Crowe slipped the knives back in their sheaths and put them in the tackle box. “Wait, don’t go yet,” Warren said. Crowe didn’t answer, shutting the lid with a little extra snap. “Where’re you going?” Warren said. Crowe got up and walked out of the room, Warren calling after him, “What about the Alamo?”

  A spotlight was bracketed to the roof of the trailer. The light was white and hard, bugs flying around. Everything around them was dark. The whore hadn’t moved, staring at something far away. She’d given up. It was time to die and she knew it. Crowe was standing over her, holding the Bowie. He taunted her, called her names and waved the knife. Warren wondered why Crowe had brought him here. He said he wanted a lookout but a lookout for what? Rocks? Bats? Cactus? Then it came to him. Crowe wanted someone to watch. He was going to put on a show, and he needed an audience. And what a fucking show it was! Warren had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t take his eyes away, even though he was scared and the screaming was loud and blood splattered on his shoes.

  In the middle of it, Crowe said, “Want some?” And Warren thought, why not? He wanted to see what it was like. Crowe gave him the other Bowie knife and it was a fucking trip! You could do whatever you wanted. You could do whatever you wanted. No rules, no watchers, no cameras, no zip.

  Later, they cleaned themselves up. They wore latex gloves and wrapped the woman in a plastic tarp. They drove to an isolated section of the Sacramento River and set the body adrift. Warren asked why they didn’t just leave her in the desert. Crowe said he wanted the police to find the body. He wanted to mess with them, shock them. He liked the idea of those assholes looking for clues when there weren’t any. Why the river? Warren asked. Crowe said the Green River Killer was famous and he wanted to be more famous than him. He wanted headlines. He wanted to be at the top of the news. He said he wished he could tell the cops his real name.

  Warren’s first two kills with Crowe had been the best. It was way better than fucking and way better than drugs. The third was a disappointment. Not the same high, not the same rush. The time between killings was worse than withdrawal. Warren had never felt this low in his life, and there were a lot of low points to choose from.

  Warren’s need to kill grew stronger. It felt like something was alive inside him, some kind of animal with fangs. It was blurry at first, but Warren decided it was a wolf. A big fucker, all black with glowing blue eyes like a malamute, growling and snapping its jaws and gnawing on Warren’s bones. At night, it howled for blood, wanting more, wanting it now. Warren could feel the wolf taking over.

  Crowe drove him crazy. He took forever to find a victim. He was so picky. They’d be out trolling the streets and pass up a perfectl
y good black chick. If you complained, Crowe would say, “Don’t you get it? She has to be perfect.” What was perfect? Warren asked. First of all, she couldn’t be a slut, Crowe explained. What a fucking joke. Crowe fucked slutty whores whenever he had the money. The perfect girl was also white, in her mid-teens, slim, pale skin, medium to long brown hair, and she had to be “classy.” “You know, a regular girl,” Crowe explained. “Nice and clean, from a good home, not all gooped up with makeup and tight clothes.” Warren thought that was the stupidest shit he’d ever heard. A good home? What the hell did that mean? You had to meet her parents? You only saw girls like that around high schools or the mall, and they were usually in packs.

  Crowe was such a hypocrite. After driving around for an hour or two, he’d decide a black chick was okay and so was short hair and a few extra pounds and caked-on makeup, a ring in her nose and gang tats everywhere. Finally, he’d say, okay, okay, let’s do it and Warren would say it’s about time, and Crowe would get pissed. Crowe had a bunch of other stupid requirements. Where and when to kidnap the girl, what they would wear, how to get her in the car blah blah fucking blah.

  If you complained, Crowe would say, “It’s my thing,” and he was “allowing” you to participate. You were a “guest” and he could “disqualify” you any time he wanted. He’d been killing damn near a decade and hadn’t been caught. “You want to know why?” Crowe would remind him every other goddamn day. “Me. Not you. Me.”

  They had one last kill together. It was just before Crowe went to the joint for a stupid bar fight. It was evening, dark because it was late in the year. Crowe was driving around the edges of downtown Sacramento. He was super excited, making lefts and rights that made no sense. Warren was hyped and jumpy. He’d snorted a few long lines of coke.