by Chuck Hogan
"Hey, Buck," said Eddie, sitting on the rear bumper of the rescue truck, looking to impress his younger brother. "Remember that high school janitor? The one with the crazy walleye?"
Bucky said, "The one I pulled the firecracker stunt on."
"Every time some freshman girl coughed up her macaroni, he'd come in wheeling his bucket of slosh, sprinkle that odor-eating powder on the mess, and mop it up. Frigging thirty years he was there, mopping up kiddie spew once a week. What a life."
Bucky said, "Seems to me that black folk, when they mop up, usually whistle a happy tune."
The others laughed aggressively, Eddie harder than anyone. "Hey, Kane," Eddie said, emboldened. "Know any tunes to pass the time?"
Ripsbaugh slowed the rhythm of his road scraping to a stop. With both hands resting comfortably on the handle of the shovel, he stood there, looking at them all. Nothing threatening in his manner. Nothing in his face. Just him leaning on his shovel, standing, staring.
Their chuckling petered out, the sneer draining from their smiles, faces going soft and empty. All except Bucky, who kept up his tomcat grin. He didn't back down, but he didn't say anything else either.
Ripsbaugh finished his shoveling and began hauling the heavy buckets back to his truck. Maddox was there and helped him load them in one at a time, the old truck's springy suspension dipping a bit under the weight. Ripsbaugh pulled out a broom and a large paper bag and returned to the roadside by the gouged oak, sweeping up chunks of windshield.
Maddox followed. The cops were packing to leave, trying to rouse Ullard. Maddox said, "Val tell you I stopped by earlier?"
Ripsbaugh said, without looking up or breaking pace, "She did."
"Seemed like I might have upset her. I hope not."
"She upsets easily these days."
"I was looking for Dill."
"She said that. Building up probable cause, I suppose."
Maddox paused. "Building up what?"
Ripsbaugh kept right on sweeping. "I figure you want to get inside his place. Legally, you can't just walk in. Even a sex offender's got rights. So you establish a threshold of suspicion. That's how you build it."
Maddox was interested. "Go on."
"There was a case like this on Court TV a month or so back. You have to get a family member to say that he's missed an appointment, or that someone's worried about his health. Or a neighbor to say he hasn't been cutting his lawn. Make it a public safety issue. That's your in."
"I see," said Maddox. "Probable cause."
"I figured maybe that was what you were going for."
"You a crime buff?"
"I watch all those shows."
The pumper and the rescue truck engines started, backing up beeping into the road, Maddox following the vehicles with his eyes until they pulled away. "Maybe you should have been made cop here, not me."
Ripsbaugh regripped the handle of the broom and swept up the last of the shattered glass, now whistling a slow tune.
17
MADDOX
ON THE MORNING OF Donald Christopher Maddox's second birthday, February 4, 1974, Sergeant Pintopolumanos was patrolling the town with Officer Reginald Maddox. Black Falls' finest rode in pairs back then, as with the logging industry still largely unregulated and the paper mill in full operation, the department was twenty men strong and still growing. Maddox's father had come late to police work, having struggled for seven years at a career selling prefabricated office dividers: cork and wood partitions for the precubicle age. The last sale he made was to the Black Falls PD. During a tour of the premises, Sergeant Pinty picked up on the salesman's interest in police work and invited him to apply for a position. Maddox's mother, newly pregnant at the time, was won over by the bucolic setting of northern Mitchum County, and three months later the Maddoxes moved from a tiny apartment in the Boston neighborhood of Readville to a three-bedroom house in Black Falls.
At a little after ten on that February morning, Pintopolumanos and Maddox came upon a white Cadillac parked under a thin sheet of snow just off the shoulder at the eastern end of Main Street, less than one hundred yards from where the road crossed into neighboring Brattle. Snoring in the driver's seat was a man named Jack Metters, a lower-echelon hoodlum from East Boston transporting a trunkful of life sentences in the form of two dozen stolen army machine guns.
Metters awoke to Officer Maddox's window knock, emerging from his Caddy with a yawn and a smile. He asked the name of the town he was in, and before Maddox's father could even answer, Metters fired a .38 Special five times with his right hand deep in the pocket of his pea jacket, dropping both policemen into the day-old snow.
Metters shed his burning coat, climbed back into his car, and continued on toward Boston, meeting his end less than one hour later in a roadblock shootout with state police.
Officer Maddox alligator-crawled back to his patrol car with two holes in his chest and one in his thigh, and died talking into the dash radio.
Pinty dragged himself off the road, where responding officers found him sitting against a young oak on a blanket of red snow, reporting no pain, only a low-voltage tingling in his toes.
Two rounds had shattered Pinty's hips. The doctors who performed his surgeries told him he would never walk again. Pinty sought a second opinionhis ownand in the summer of 1975 returned to the same tree he had been found under, stepping from the car under his own power and chopping down that young oak with an ax. He milled the wood himself, fashioning his walking stick and topping it with a smooth, silver English grip ordered from a catalog.
Looking at the walking stick now, the nub of it tapping against the toe of Pinty's boot as he sat deep in a big-armed, mission-style chair, Maddox was reminded of Pinty's determination, of the man's strength and pride. The police department was his life's work, as was, by extension, Black Falls itself, and the prospect of bequeathing his legacy to a band of brigands was eating him up inside.
"Cancers," Pinty said, after Maddox's recap. "Got to carve them out with a knife. Cut them right out of our own goddamn belly."
Maddox sat facing him on a skirted, powder blue sofa. Mrs. Pinty's China dolls smiled from their display shelves in the formal living room, the collection untouched since her death. Maddox had stopped by after his shift, early enough to find Pinty with his breakfast napkin still tucked inside his collar, but not so early that he didn't have his hairpiece in place. Pinty's modest fluff of vanity was a decade old now, a shade or two darker than his existing silver fringe.
Pinty was in the process of converting his house for first-floor living. Maddox saw the folded wheelchair hidden behind the sofa.
"Ever heard the term 'formication'?"
Pinty scowled. He was not in a learning mood. "That's when a man and a woman "
Maddox smiled. "It's the sensation of insects creeping beneath your skin."
"That's something they need a name for?"
"Causes you to pick at your own flesh. People get obsessed, they wind up tearing apart their face, their arms."
"It was probably just the shock of the crash."
"That's what Bucky said."
Pinty didn't like that, jabbing at the rug with the rubber nub and twisting the handle, as though screwing the cane into the floor.
"Look," Maddox said. "I know you don't want to believe it."
Pinty gripped the fat arm of his chair, Maddox knowing better than to help him get to his feet. Stiff from sitting too long, Pinty hobbled over to the China dolls, as though presenting himself before their glass-eyed innocence. "So, this guff about the schnapps?"
"Cover story. Kids drunk, and now dazed from the crash. He doesn't want them drug tested."
Pinty sagged a bit before the display. "If you're right about all this, Donny "
"It's not about me being right. It's about Bucky going down." Maddox frowned, remembering Bucky's attempt at intimidation at the accident scene, then summarizing the exchange for Pinty. "He basically outlined the Ibbits crash scenario to me."
In October of the previous year, a man living out of a 1989 Ford Escort had died in a fiery, one-car crash way up in the hills above town. By the time the Rainfield Good Samaritan ambulance arrived to take over for Black Falls Fire and Rescue, the blaze had long since burned through the Escort, its driver, and all his belongings.
The wrecking company recovered enough of the VIN number to trace the car back to a California fugitive named Hugo Ibbits, which occasioned a visit to Black Falls from a U.S. Marshal. It turned out that Ibbits was a former chiropractor who, six months before his death, skipped out of Fresno while awaiting trial on malpractice and insurance fraud charges. He had been a prominent player in a complex automobile insurance scam set up to finance the mass production of crystal methamphetamine, of which the exDr. Ibbits was an addict.
After some initial confusion over the exact time line, the marshal was informed that Ibbits had not been held in the Black Falls lockup on a vagrancy charge over the long Columbus Day weekend, as was initially thought, but was released following a traffic stop late Friday afternoon. Witnesses who had claimed to see Bucky Pail handcuff and arrest the driver of a beat-up Ford Escort outside the Falls Diner three days before the late-Monday-night crash later changed their stories. Once the fugitive's remains were proven conclusively to be Ibbits's, the matter was considered closed.
Maddox said, "And another thing. I don't know where Bucky was when his beeper went off tonight. But when I got up close to him, there was this smell."
"Yeah?" grumbled Pinty. "Like corruption?"
"Like ammonia. Or cat piss. Same smell I got when the Zoo Lady pulled open the front door of Sinclair's building."
Pinty turned to him. "You're saying?"
"Well, I finally got a call back this morning from the probation office. Sinclair's caseworker is away on vacation for two weeks. That's why we haven't heard anything about him missing his court-ordered group sessions." Maddox briefly considered telling Pinty about the footprints in Heavey's backyard, the hand-rolled cigarette he had found in the trees. He decided Pinty was red-faced enough as it was. "Zoo Lady hasn't seen him. Says she heard him upstairs. But then again "
"Then again she's the goddamn Zoo Lady."
"The woman sings to her dogs to help them urinate in the street. And she's one of the least crazy people in town."
Pinty discovered his breakfast napkin and pulled it from the neck of his loose-collared, Cuban-style shirt. "You think they got onto him somehow? Maybe decided to finish what they started before that kook Frond got in their way?"
Maddox scowled at the mental image of that fidgety freak Sinclair, reminded once again that the future of the town and Pinty's legacy rode on that skinny pervert's shoulders.
18
FROND
NOISES BROUGHT HIM BACK. Like a knuckle tap-tap-tapping on his consciousness. Randall Frond's eyes fluttered open, only to have his forehead, brow, and lids slam down immediately again like a crash gate.
A smashing headache. He was hurt. He didn't know how, yetmaybe badlybut he was not paralyzed.
He was restrained.
He heard the protest of the old mattress as he moved. He was tied up, facedown, on the bed in his spare room.
Okay. He was being robbed.
He had maybe forty dollars in cash in the kitchen downstairs. No television. No consumer electronics, other than his computer. Nothing thieves want.
His arms were pulled behind him, wrists bound by something cutting like wire or twine, also his ankles. He tried to twiddle his fingers, to see if he could get loose, but without circulation they were dead.
In T-shirt and boxers, he had just come out of the bathroom. He was taking quick little showers three times a day to keep the humidity from driving him madhe owned only one window fan, no air conditionerbut it was a losing battle. Sweat popped from his pores as soon as he toweled off, which was when he had heard the loose board on the stairs. The third step from the top: he knew exactly where it was. Artists would occasionally drop by for him to take pictures of their wares, which he fronted for them on eBay, but unlike most others in town, Frond locked his doors. A real-world habit he had been unable to shake. He'd said, "Hello?" and stepped into the hallway with a stick of deodorant in his hand.
Rummaging. He heard that now. Near, on the other side of the wall. The bathroom? What were they looking for in there?
Water ran through the pipes. You could hear it wash all the way down into the basement. Creak, creakthe sound of the wooden towel rack.
Burglars who washed their hands?
He shut his eyes. He tried to journey to another place. He worried about freeing himself after they were gone. It could be days until someone else came by.
And what then? What could he do about this robbery? Call his friends at the police station?
What happened when the thieves didn't find anything worth taking? What if they were messed up on drugs or something? What if they came back in here pissed off and wild? All they needed was one of these pillows. Hold it over his head, and in a minute or two he would be on to the next life. He was utterly vulnerable.
Panic rising, he started rocking himself. He wasn't even aware at first, but then he began to rock in earnest, desperate to get his face off this soft comforter. His arms were numb and aching at the same time, almost like phantom limbs, as he tried to get some back-and-forth momentum.
He got too much. He rolled onto his arms and his tied-back feet, arching his belly, then tumbled off the bed, landing hard on his side with an "Ooof!" that knocked the wind out of him.
He was sucking for breath when he realized the rummaging had stopped.
Footsteps now. Leaving the bathroom, coming around through the hallway.
Oh God.
He regained his breath with a great and awful groan, lying there facing the underside of the bed, where his fireproof safe was.
The footsteps were in the room now. He could feel their weight on the floor. They were going to be pissed off. They were going to break his arms.
"I'm sorry," Frond said. "I fell. I just fell. I'm sorry. Take anything you want."
Silence. Maybe it was better not to hear the intruder's voice. Good that he was facing away from the door.
"I know it's not much. I don't have much. Some cash in the creamer in the downstairs cupboard. I gave away everything when I moved up here."
Waiting.
Nothing.
But in the awful silence, huge in the room, like an enormous bell without a clappersomething about the intruder's malevolent presence, his barely heard breathing, gave Frond a sudden, terrible insight.
"Bucky Pail?" he said.
The footsteps moved. Coming toward him. Whispering on the maple floor, sneakers.
"Wait. Listen, Bucky. You wanted me out of townI'll go. Now. I swear, I'll leave tonight. Not a word to anyone, I'll just go"
Hands seized his bent leg, smooth-fingered, almost without texture, dragging him from the bed.
"I promise," Frond pleaded. "I'll never tell anyone."
His sweaty flesh squeaked against the floor varnish, creating a friction burn, until he bumped up over the raised threshold of the doorway onto the rough carpeting of the upstairs hall. The strange hands were dragging him to the top of the stairs.
"Wait! PleaseI don't know anything, I tell you. Listen to me. The state police. They said they were going to do something. They promised me, they said they were going to send someone."
The dragging stopped. Frond was on his belly, the hands moving to his arms now. He was staring down the curving wooden stairs.
"But they never did! Don't you see? They did nothing. It all came to nothing, and I I was wrong. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. Just please let me go, and I promise I'll never sayNo!"
The stairs upended, rushing at him, tumbling, pummeling. Unable to protect his head or his neck or any part of him, he fell like a screaming human football, the blows coming faster and faster until they stopped.
Frond faced the bottom step. He tasted blood and rug and his neck was wrenched, his breath groaning through it.
Footsteps again. Coming down.
Frond had a fun-house angle on the curved staircase and the man descending them. Black sneakers. Black pants, black shirt. Black hair, wild and long.
But his face. Mashed and deformed, nearly inhumanyet, somehow, horribly familiar.
Frond tried to scream as freakishly smooth hands reached for his head.
PART II
OVERKILL
19
