“Loren, what are you doing?”
“Is Gene here yet?”
“No. I’m just making dinner.”
“I was supposed to meet him here. We’ve got a real problem. The state police called a meeting today . . . Can I come in? Gene thought he’d be home by now.”
She was too polite to do anything but let him in, even if she’d had a second thought. “Of course, I’m sorry, come in. Gene usually is here by now . . . ”
He pushed the door shut behind him and she turned to lead the way through the kitchen. He had the pipe in his hand, and her head was right there, like a baseball frozen in space, and he could see the salt-and-pepper hair sweeping up past her small pink ear.
Singleton hit her behind the ear with the real, actual lead pipe.
The sound was a sharp whap, and Singleton could feel the soft pipe deform around Calb’s skull. Calb said, “Uhhh” and dropped to the floor. Tried to push up, still alive.
Margery, who’d waited by the side of the house, came up, inside, and squatted next to her. “She’s alive,” she said. “Give me the goddamn pipe, you dumb shit.”
Singleton handed her the pipe, and Margery straddled Calb, stooping, and hit her a half-dozen times on the head, hard, as though she were breaking rocks with a hammer.
The second or third blow probably killed her; the others were just to make sure. There was some blood, and Singleton pulled one of the plastic sacks out of his pocket and handed it to her and she lifted Calb’s head by the hair and pulled the bag over it.
Still a little blood on the kitchen floor. Margery found some 409 all-purpose cleaner under the sink, cleaned up the blood with a couple of paper towels. The towels went in the garbage bag on top of Calb’s head, and they dragged the body down a hallway and leaned it against the wall, in a slumped, seated position.
Margery was breathing hard. She wiped her hands together, as if dusting them off, and said, “All right. That’s one. Give me that little gun—just in case. Gene’s a big one, and you’re hurt.”
SINGLETON STEPPED INTO the living room, turned on a light, then turned on a hallway light that led upstairs, so there would be light coming down from an upstairs window when Calb pulled into the driveway. He wanted Calb to think that Gloria might be upstairs.
He told his mother and she shook her head as if it were all a terrible mistake. He went to turn off the lights and she said, “Nah, nah, leave it. Get in position.” Then she slapped her forehead. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“I gotta make a call . . . You get in your spot.”
If Calb pulled straight into the garage, as he should, he’d be coming in the back door, through the kitchen. Singleton moved across the half-lit kitchen and looked out a side window toward the garage. The garage lights should come on when Calb hit his remote control. Nothing yet.
He could hear his mother muttering into the phone in the front room. What was all that about? Something at the nursing home?
Singleton leaned back against the wall, and for the first time in five minutes, noticed the pain in his chest. Not so bad right now. Not quite so bad, but his chest felt wet. He stuck a hand inside his shirt, felt the wound, felt a dampness and pulled his fingers back out. Blood. Goddamnit, he’d broken the wound open.
He had to find somebody to work on it, and soon. God knew what the lead bullet was doing inside of him. Probably poisoning him. Thinking about it sent him to the sink, where he washed his hands again, and wiped them carefully on paper towels. He put the towels in his pocket—DNA. His mother came back in the kitchen.
“What ya doing?”
“I’m bleeding again,” he said.
“Won’t kill ya,” she said. “I seen a lot worse.” She turned up her head and sniffed. “Something in the oven?” She stepped over to the stove, and looked through the glass front. “Looks like a casserole.”
“Pork chops,” Singleton said, nodding at the sideboard. Three thick center-cut porkchops sat on a sideboard, and one of the burners was glowing on the stove. “Turn the stove off,” he said.
Margery left the burner on but put a kettle on it, obscuring the orange glow. Not bad, Singleton thought: the bubbling pot killed the silence. “Better get back in the hall,” Singleton told her. “Gene doesn’t miss dinner.”
Calb arrived as the words came out of Singleton’s mouth. Margery slunk back into the hall as the headlights swept over the side of the house and the driveway. The lights in the garage went on, and Singleton said, aloud, “Be alone.” He pressed himself to the kitchen wall beside the door from the entry.
The garage door went up, then went down, and a moment later, Calb was at the back door, stomping his feet on a snow mat. “Gloria?”
He closed the outer door and stepped into the kitchen, leaning forward, groping for the light. “Gloria?”
Singleton hit him on the crown of his head and he went down to his knees. Singleton, grimacing, hit him again, and Calb stayed on his knees and one hand came up, his face turned up, and he said “cars,” or something like that, and Singleton hit him across the eyes and this time, Calb went down.
Margery stepped up, took the pipe, crouched, and began hitting him as she had Gloria, the hammer swinging once, twice, three times, four, five . . .
Breathing hard, she finally stood upright, light in her rattlesnake eyes. How many times had she hit Calb? He had no idea, but Calb was dead, all right—his head was like a bag of bone chips.
“That got him,” the old lady said with satisfaction.
“Did you kill people at work? The old men you didn’t like?”
The rattlesnake eyes slid away. “What’re you talking about? Let’s get to work. Dumb shit.”
Singleton looked at Calb and suddenly began bawling again. His mother muttered something and went into the living room, and Singleton wiped his eyes on his sleeves and got a bag out and bagged Gene Calb’s head. Then he got a paper towel and the 409, cleaned a smear of blood off the floor, put the paper towel in the bag, and called his mother, and together they dragged Calb into the hall and left him next to his wife.
Back in the kitchen. “Goddamn, something smells good,” Margery said, turning toward the stove where the casserole was still cooking, smacking her lips.
MARGERY MADE HIM clean the floor again; he was doing that, and she was back in the living room, “keeping an eye out,” she said, when the doorbell rang. He was on his hands and knees and heard the door open, and his mother say, “Come in,” and then, “Where’s Loren and Gene?” and he recognized the voice and his eyes got wide and he lurched to his feet and called, “Katina?”
And at that very second, he heard the door close and remembered giving Margery the .380, and he stepped to the doorway with the towel in his hand and saw Katina looking at him, a question on her face, and Margery standing behind her, her arm pointed at Katina’s head, and he shouted, “No . . . ”
Bang!
Katina went down. Her eyes rolled and she went down on her face and she never twitched, and Singleton screamed something at his mother and started toward her, and she leveled the .380 at him and screamed back, “Get the fuck away from me, get away . . . ”
EVERYTHING LOCKED UP. Then Margery said, quietly, “It’s gonna take two of us to finish this. She had to go, because there was no way for you to break it off that wouldn’t be suspicious. Now, you want to help, or you want me to finish you off, too?”
The gun never wavered.
“GODDAMN, THAT SMELLS good,” Margery said. It had taken a while, but Singleton wasn’t going to hurt her. Not now—or not yet. He’d started thinking.
She went to the stove, opened the oven, took a couple of hotpad mitts off hooks beside the stove, and pulled the casserole out. She turned the top burner back on, found a pan in the bottom of the stove, and dropped in the porkchops. She found plates and bowls and silverware, dumped some macaroni and cheese from the casserole dish into the bowls, fried up the porkchops and slid them onto the dish.
�
��Damn, that’s good.” Margery said. They sat in the semidark kitchen, and talked about what to do next.
Chest hurt.
They finished eating, cleaned up the dishes and put them away, threw the cooking trash in the garbage, and began ransacking the house. Two suitcases, clothes, shoes, jewelry, Gloria Calb’s purse, cosmetics, some photographs—they took two photographs out of their frames, and left the frames. Threw it all into the suitcases and carried the suitcases out to Calb’s Suburban. As they went through the house, collecting things that the Calbs would take with them to Hell, they searched it, looking for money.
If Calb had left money in the house, Margery said, and the cops found it, that could queer everything. They found nothing except two safe deposit keys for a bank in Fargo. Margery took them, put them in her purse.
THEN THE BODIES.
Gene and Gloria Calb went out to the Suburban. He humped them out as fast as he could, but Calb was heavy, and he wound up dragging him. Still, the effort nearly killed him, and Margery was no help at all. Singleton’s chest felt as though it were tearing apart, and he hadn’t yet gotten to the hard part of the evening.
Katina, in dying, had leaked onto the carpet. They left the blood spot and carried her upstairs, got a chair from the bedroom, pushed open the access hatch to the insulation space under the roof, and pushed her body up through the hole. She was wearing a sweater, and Singleton carefully dragged the sweater across a rough spot in the framing around the hatch, so that a few strands of wool were pulled out.
Back downstairs.
Forgetting something, he thought. Hurting. He needed another pill, is what he needed. Christ, this might be too much . . .
What was he forgetting? He walked through the whole scene, and remembered the shell from the .380.
Found it in the kitchen, carried it outside, rolled it through Gene Calb’s fingers, and made sure he got one good right thumbprint on the cartridge, as it would be if Gene were pressing a shell into a magazine.
Carried the cartridge back inside and tossed it on the floor.
His mother had one last idea. Gene had a home office . . .
They went through a Rolodex, and inside found a Kansas City phone number for Davis. He dialed the number and a woman answered, “Hello?”
“My name’s Carl. We are asking Kansas City people for donations to the Missouri State Law Enforcement Association, which supports your local state, county, and municipal law enforcement officers—”
“We gave some,” a woman’s voice said.
“Our records don’t show that,” Singleton said. “We feel our law enforcement officers . . . ”
He strung the conversation out another ten seconds, until an increasingly irate woman said, “Go away,” and the phone slammed down. There’d be a record that just before the Calbs disappeared, they’d called Shawn Davis in Kansas City.
Good enough.
In the garage, he got a shovel, and they climbed into Calb’s truck. He had three hours before he went on duty. Needed another pill, too.
As they backed out of the driveway he thought, Goddamn, those pork chops were good. Then he thought, Katina.
Margery said, “Watch out for the mailbox, you dumb shit.”
THE REST OF the evening was straight out of a horror film. By the time Singleton got home, he hurt so badly he could barely breathe. He peeled off his coat, peeled off the fleece under it, and found a three-inch bloodstain on his shirt. He took off the shirt, and his bloody undershirt, touched the bullet wound, and flinched. The scab over the hole had cracked open, and when he touched it, the pain flared through his rib cage, and ran around almost to his spine. At this rate, his arm would soon be useless.
He began sobbing as he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Katina. What about Katina? Was she in heaven? Was she looking down at him, knowing what he’d done?
He braced himself on the sink with both hands, and tipped his head down, and tried to cry, something more than the gasping sobs . . . nothing came out. After a moment, he pulled himself back together and began looking at the wound again. Something had to be done.
He carefully manipulated the bruised skin with his fingers, squeezing it, like a pimple, fighting the pain. The skin and fat wasn’t particularly thick at the entry point, and he thought—could it be his imagination?—that he felt a lump. The lump didn’t move, though.
Hurt. But he couldn’t help himself. He went to the dresser and dug out a sewing kit, took out a needle, ran hot water on it for a moment, and then, using the eye end, probed the bullet hole. The probe hurt, but not as much as squeezing the wound. Holding his breath, he moved the needle around, then down a bit, maneuvered, felt as though he were pushing muscle aside—and hit something hard.
Didn’t feel like bone. He moved the needle carefully now, judging the characteristics of the lump. Found the edges. “That’s it,” he muttered to himself. He found what he believed to be the center of the slug, and pushed on it. A little pain, but the lump didn’t move. He found the edge of it, explored beside it. Brighter blood was coming out now, apparently from freshly pierced capillaries, and it made the exploration more difficult, the lump more slippery. But he found the side of it, and pushed with the end of the needle. It didn’t move. He explored some more; he was sweating now, from the pain, but the pain was still bearable.
After a minute, he pulled the needle out and looked at it. The bullet, he thought, was stuck in a rib—hadn’t gone through, but had gotten into it. Every time he breathed, or flexed, the motion was transmitted through his rib cage, and that was where the spasms of pain came from. He thought about it for a moment, then pulled on a sweatshirt and went out to the garage.
If he hadn’t had just the right thing to work with, he might not have tried. But he did have the right thing, or what seemed like the right thing, in his tool box: a pair of tiny, needle-nosed pliers used to do automotive electrical work.
This was going to hurt, he thought. But if it worked . . .
He carried them back into the house, took two pills, scrubbed the pliers with antibacterial soap, and then, still not happy with their condition, dropped them in a saucepan, covered them with water, and put them on the stove. He let them boil for a while, then cool down underwater, as he waited for the pills to take hold. He glanced at the clock: forty-five minutes before he was due at work. He could do this.
He did it sitting at the kitchen table. Probed the lump with the needle, then slowly pushed the pliers in until he touched it. The pain had been dulled by the pills, but this hurt as bad as anything yet. His right hand, the pliers hand, began shaking, so he pinned the pliers in place with his left hand, and leaned against the table, bracing himself.
Then with his right hand, steady now, he slowly spread the pliers, pushed them down alongside the lump—or what felt like down, his hand shaking again—and squeezed. Pain flared through his body. Might have gotten some meat, he thought. Squeezed . . . and had it.
Slow and steady. He held it, pulled, pulled . . . had some meat, but then suddenly felt the lump come free. Held it, held it, pulled . . .
And had it out. It emerged like a small, gray larva, slick with blood, a .22 slug half the size of a pea.
Blood dribbled out of his chest again, but now everything felt different. The pain was changed—there’d been an ugly, corrosive feel to it, and now it just hurt. This he could handle.
He tottered off to the bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror. His face seemed narrower, sharper, wolf-like; and white, from the pain, his frown lines etched deep.
But he could touch his chest without flinching. He could manipulate the wound area without the arc of pain. He took two tabs of penicillin and a pain pill and looked at his watch. Had to start moving. He patched himself with gauze and tape, carried his bloody shirt and undershirt and fleece down to the washer, and threw them in, poured in a half-cup of liquid Tide, and started it. Climbed into his uniform.
Almost done now, he thought, as he buttoned up his shirt. The
re was Letty West—but if they were searching the landfill, he would have known about it, and so far, they weren’t. Maybe she didn’t know? Maybe he’d taken that risk for nothing?
He had the night to think about it.
And to think about the bullet. There was a sense of accomplishment with the bullet. Damn, that was a story. Maybe he could tell it someday.
THAT NIGHT WAS the longest in Singleton’s life—and like most of the other nights of his life, nothing happened. He drove back and forth through town, his usual eleven o’clock grid, then headed out into the countryside, passing through a list of small Custer County towns, showing the flag for the sheriff. He tried to think about Katina as he drove, but where Katina used to be, there was a big dark box. He tried to focus on her face, and nothing came. He tried to think about what would happen in the next few days, and couldn’t think of anything.
At seven o’clock, he signed off, went home, and crashed—lay fully clothed on his bed, unfeeling, until the telephone rang.
19
THEY WERE STUCK.
They’d spent the day before tramping around Broderick, talking with housewives and Calb employees, getting nowhere. The pitch Lucas had made to the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t produced anything yet, and Lucas began to wonder if he might be able to devise a way to pull the killer in. The problem was a lack of bait. There was Letty, but he couldn’t use her. Might have been able to use her if she was a fifty-year-old asshole who’d brought the trouble on herself, but not an innocent teenager.
He worried a little that he’d even bothered to think of reasons not to use her . . .
HE WAS SITTING on his bed at the Motel 6, reading a Star Tribune story about the attack on the West house, and waiting for Del to knock. The TV was tuned to the Weather Channel, because they’d heard a rumor from the night clerk that snow was coming in. Coming in somewhere. When he looked out the window after he got up, there were a few fat flakes drifting around, but nothing serious. He was rereading the fire story when the room phone rang.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 129
