His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  This was the perfect weapon for taking care of the clown.

  Jim Adams.

  Yes, Jim Adams. A mundane name for such a monstrously evil man. Steve preferred to think of him as “the clown.” It made it easier to do what he had to do.

  No, that wasn’t true. It was already easy. He wanted to kill the clown.

  He was looking forward to it.

  Swinging the machete from side to side, listening to the swishing sound it made as it sliced through the air, Steve glanced down at the other weapons on the floor. He decided to take all of them with him, the sword and knives as well as the machete, and he grabbed a couple of his mother’s old dresses from the pile on the couch and used them to wrap up the blades. Scouting around, he found a heavy black garbage sack, and he dumped out the knicknacks that his mother had put in there and carefully put the wrapped weapons into the bag.

  A strangely loud snap sounded from one of the back rooms of the house, a noise like a dry twig breaking—

  His father? His mother?

  —and he picked up the garbage sack with both hands and headed out the front door. The weapons were getting very heavy, and he waddled to the car, where he had to place the black bag on the ground before opening the trunk and loading the weapons inside. He returned to lock up, but was afraid to go into the house, and so didn’t bother to turn off the light before closing the door and locking it. He hurried back to the car.

  He smiled to himself as he pulled out of the driveway and headed home.

  Thirty-four

  He didn’t even think up an excuse this time, didn’t bother to tell Sherry he was leaving. He just took off, packing what little he needed and heading east to Arizona. Wanting to leave no paper trail, he drove rather than flew, sleeping only a few hours Friday night before getting up at three o’clock Saturday morning and setting out.

  He stopped only for gas, a bathroom break and a quick McMuffin breakfast in the small desert town of Quartzsite, passing through Phoenix shortly before ten and reaching Flagstaff close to noon.

  The clown’s house was in a poor section of town adjacent to the railroad tracks that ran parallel to old Route 66. Steve passed a series of run-down, once-attractive motels and then turned on a rutted side road that bumped over the tracks and led to a neighborhood of brown-lawned brick houses. Jim Adams’s home was identical to those on either side of it except for the fact that the edge of the yard had old pinwheels planted in the ground rather than flowers, and there was a faded rainbow painted on the side of the curbside mailbox.

  Steve drove around the block twice, gathering his courage. Finally, he decided to just do it, to not over-think everything but go with his gut. It had served him well so far and would no doubt see him through this as well. He parked on the next street over, rummaging through his belongings until he found the machete. Unwrapping the blade and casting aside his mother’s dress—one he recognized as her favorite church outfit—he grasped the smooth handle of the weapon and simply walked down the sidewalk and around the corner, acting as though this were something he did all the time. Two boys were playing basketball in one driveway, and an old man in a wife-beater T-shirt was sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer out of the bottle in another, but none of them noticed anything amiss as he strode by.

  His gait slowed as he reached the Adams house, the clown house. His muscles tensed as he realized that he was no longer on the way to his destination; he was at his destination. Clutching the heavy machete, he made his way across the nonexistent lawn to the front door, moving slowly, crouching low, trying not to be seen. He felt like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, emerging from the steaming water to kill Marlon Brando, and he started humming to himself a vaguely Middle Eastern guitar riff that started out as “The End” but somehow morphed into “Misirlou.”

  He thought of ringing the bell or knocking on the door, then attacking the clown when he answered. But he didn’t want to do anything out in the open, where he could be seen, and he decided to sneak around to the rear of the house. Still humming to himself, he crept up the driveway, went around the edge of the carport and entered the fenceless backyard. On edge, prepared for anything, ready to lash out on a second’s notice, he made his way through the dead weeds to the back door. He stopped for a moment to look around, but aside from a leafless tree and a cannibalized motorcycle rotting into the ground, the yard was empty. There was no one there.

  If Adams was here, he was inside.

  Carefully, Steve reached out and grasped the doorknob. He expected it to be locked, but it turned easily in his hand, and he pulled open the door as quietly as he could. He closed it behind him but not all the way, not wanting the latch to click and alert whomever might be in the house to his presence.

  He was in some sort of antechamber filled with old skis, dirty snow boots, and plastic winter toys. A flat shovel leaned against the wall next to him. In the center of the narrow room, an open doorway led into the house proper and slowly, cautiously, he moved forward, creeping on tiptoe so as not to make the floor creak. He poked his head around the corner, saw no one there, and stepped inside.

  The interior of the house was decorated like a child’s play area. The first room in which he found himself (what was it? a bedroom? a living room? a den?) featured brightly colored trains painted on the walls, and cartoon character mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Instead of ordinary furniture, there were a half dozen or so metal-and-plastic chairs of the type used in school classrooms surrounding a long Formica-topped table with half-finished ship and airplane models atop it. Twin Hot Wheels tracks ran down the center of the room. An open trunk filled with toys sat against one wall.

  Steve felt sick to his stomach. It was possible that Jim Adams actually enjoyed looking at childish images and playing with toys. That might very well be his taste. But Steve couldn’t help seeing an ulterior motive, and he knew that a lot of young boys would think this place looked cool.

  He could not tell yet if the clown was home, but he felt more scared and nervous now than he had at any time he could remember. It was a child’s fear he felt, the same fear he had experienced when he’d first encountered the man—

  Touch it!

  —and it was all he could do not to turn around, run out of the house and speed far away from here as quickly as he could. There was none of the exhilarating tension he’d experienced while stalking Gina or lying in wait for McColl, none of the excitement and anticipation he’d felt setting the trap for Will, none of the sudden cathartic anger that had propelled him through his encounters with Lyman Fischer and his mother. No, this was totally different, and for the first time, he was afraid to confront his victim and did not have the confidence that he could pull this off.

  He stepped over the Hot Wheels tracks, walked gingerly around a gumball machine—and promptly stumbled over an unseen rubber ball. He caught himself quickly, before he fell, but the ball careened off to the left and hit one of the Hot Wheels cars. The collision sounded impossibly loud in the otherwise silent house. Steve waited for a moment, listening, but heard no noise from elsewhere in the clown’s home and assumed he was safe. He continued on, hardly daring to breathe, keeping both eyes on the floor in front of him. He was holding up the machete, ready to strike at anything that moved, but the weapon was getting heavy, and if this went on much longer, his arms would be too tired to lift the blade when he needed to.

  Trying not to make any more noise, he made his way toward the doorway at the opposite end of the room. Logic told him that the door should open onto a hallway, but he could see through the opening that it led into another room.

  Where a man lay prone on a water bed.

  Jim Adams.

  Steve stopped. Like the room he was in, the one before him had no traditional counterpart. Yes, there was a water bed in the center of the room, but there was also a refrigerator and a stove. Funhouse mirrors were mounted on the walls, distorting the scene before them. As he moved closer, he saw that a circular mirror was mounted on the ce
iling above the bed.

  The clown was either dead or deeply asleep, since none of the noise Steve made had awakened him. He was wearing no makeup and was obviously older than when Steve had seen him as a child, but he looked much the same, if slightly heavier. Even in repose, his features were rough and cruel, and Steve wondered how many other children the monster had attacked throughout the years.

  He stepped into the room.

  He was humming again, though he hadn’t noticed that he’d started to do so, and he was moving forward in a defensive crouch, machete raised, like a predator about to attack. Adams heard the noise and awoke, his eyes flickering open, but Steve didn’t give him a chance to sit up or say a word. Holding the handle of the machete with both hands, he lifted it high and brought it down hard on the man’s neck. The blade sliced easily through skin and muscle, embedding itself deep into bone and cartilage. In the second before contact, Adams’s eyes had widened and his mouth opened as if to scream. There was no scream, though. Only the thunk of the blade and a sickening gurgle that issued not from his open mouth but from the gash in his throat.

  Suddenly blood was spurting everywhere, along with water from the punctured mattress. With no solid support beneath the body, it was almost impossible to pull the machete out of the neck, but Steve finally managed to do it and brought the weapon down again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Within moments, what had been a man was only disjointed chunks of bleeding flesh floating in a pool of red-tinged water.

  Finished with the clown but with his rage not yet satiated, Steve tore through the house on a rampage, upending chairs and tables, stomping on breakable objects, ripping frames and pictures from the walls. If anyone had been in his way, he would have cut the person down, but luckily the house was empty, and he rushed from room to room like a Tasmanian devil, destroying whatever he saw.

  He ended up in what was probably supposed to be the kitchen—there was a double sink in the center of a long counter that ran the length of one wall—but instead housed dolls, dummies and stuffed animals of all shapes and sizes. Dropping the machete and bending forward, hands on his knees, he breathed deeply, feeling suddenly exhausted. The muscles in his arms hurt, as did his throat, and he wondered if he had been screaming. He honestly didn’t know, and he tried to listen, over the sound of his ragged breathing, for the wail of approaching sirens.

  He heard nothing, though, and as his breathing and heart rate returned to normal, he figured that he had gotten away with it once again. All he had to do now was get out of here.

  He straightened up, picking the machete off the floor. His hands and clothes were red with splattered blood, and he could feel a tightening wetness on the skin of his cheeks and chin that meant his face was probably covered in blood as well. He thought of making his way back through the strange rooms of the damaged house, but the idea of seeing the clown’s dead body—or what was left of it—sent a chill down his spine, and he decided to just exit through the front of the home.

  He walked into the daylight, blinking, aware only now of how dark it had been in the clown’s house. A woman shaking out a rug next door saw him emerge onto the porch covered with blood, a grossly overweight woman who dropped the rug and ran screaming into her house. Seconds later, a muscular man with a shaved head came barreling out, his features set in an expression of fierce determination. Through the open door behind the man, Steve could see the woman talking frantically on the phone. It was too late to finesse his way out of this one, so Steve ran to meet the would-be hero, machete in hand.

  The bald guy could see what he was up against and was looking around for some type of weapon to combat the machete, but he was still moving forward, refusing to back down, and Steve used that to his advantage, lifting his blade high and slashing it sideways across the man’s enormous chest. His scream was more like an animal’s than a human’s, so primal was its agony, but Steve didn’t allow it to go on for more than a few seconds. As the man fell to the ground, Steve brought the machete down on the top of his skull, swinging with all his might, and the bald head cracked open, blood spilling out like red yolk from an enormous egg. Two more hacking slices and the man’s arms were almost completely severed, attached to the body by nothing more than bone and a few strained strips of tendon.

  He could hear the sound of police cars drawing closer, and though he wanted nothing more than to go next door and hack the limbs off the bitch who had called them, Steve knew he was out of time. He had parked around the block, so at least the woman would not be able to identify his car, but no one could miss a bloody man with a machete running down the street, and he wished he had parked closer.

  He was about to take off and make a run for it when it occurred to him that a much faster and safer way to reach the other street would be to cut through Adams’s backyard and the yard of the house behind it. That would place him at just about the right spot to reach his car.

  With the sirens growing louder, Steve turned and ran around the side of the house to the rear. Speeding through the weeds, past the motorcycle and the dead tree, he saw only a low chain-link fence separating Adams’s yard from the one behind him. On the other side of the fence stood a line of scraggly bushes, and Steve hopped the rusted chain link and passed between almost bare shrub branches to enter the other house’s backyard.

  A young girl was facing him, swinging on a swing.

  He was going to ignore her, going to run past, but the girl had to speak.

  “I’m telling!” she called to him.

  There was no time to reason with her, no time to argue. The sirens were almost here, and that fat bitch was probably still on the phone with the 911 operator, blabbing away.

  He turned, sprinted over to the swing set.

  The girl must have seen the machete or sensed something in his face, in his action, in his body language, because all of a sudden she grew very afraid. “I won’t,” she said meekly. “I won’t tell.”

  But he knew that she would. As soon as he was out of here and the threat was gone, she would tell everything to anyone who would listen: her friends, her parents, her teachers, the police.

  He dropped the machete and grabbed the girl by the arm, yanking her off the swing. She cried out, a short, sharp yelp of shock and fear.

  He twisted her neck.

  And she stopped.

  Letting her body fall to the ground, he picked up his weapon and hurried on, amazed at how easy it had been. Killing adults was always difficult and messy, involving strength and strategy, requiring his full focus and attention. But dispatching a child was smooth and effortless, scarcely more difficult than throwing away an unwanted toy.

  He ran through the side yard of the house out to the street, encountering no one, not the girl’s parents or sibling or friend. His car was parked in front of the next house over, and he ran to the car, fishing the keys from his pocket. The two boys had finished playing basketball and were gone, but the old man was still in his lawn chair drinking beer. As luck would have it, his attention was focused on a loud motorcycle racing down the south side of the street, and Steve opened his car door, got in and took off.

  He glanced in his rearview mirror at the house of the little girl, wondering how long it would take for her parents to find her, thinking that if they discovered her soon and engaged the cops, it might give him slightly more lead time.

  Steve recalled what it had felt like to twist the girl’s neck. He’d enjoyed killing her, he realized. He had not expected that, but there it was.

  That made him worse than the clown.

  No. No, it didn’t.

  He didn’t know why it didn’t, but he knew that it was true.

  He reached an intersection, saw red and blue police lights speeding down a parallel street to his right, and immediately turned left. Seeing his red hands on the steering wheel, catching a glimpse of his bloody visage in the mirror, he was acutely aware of how conspicuous he was, how eye-catching his appearance would
be to other drivers. He needed to clean up. Fast. He’d brought a change of clothes in the car, but didn’t know where he could go to get out of these blood-soaked garments. He should have checked into a motel when he’d first arrived in town, before going to the clown’s house. He would have been able to go there now, to shower, change, even lie low if need be.

  But he hadn’t thought this through at all. He’d been so rattled just by the idea of the clown that he figured he’d better act while he was still brave enough to do so. He’d allowed his emotions to hold sway, and it had kept him from coming up with an exit strategy.

  He’d done what he came for, though. He’d killed the man and gotten away.

  Steve was sticking to the side streets, traveling as quickly as he could through residential areas without attracting attention. He emerged next to the university, NAU, and saw a deserted construction site off to the left, the steel skeleton of a new building arising from what appeared to have been a former parking lot. He didn’t know whether the workers were on break or had gone for the day, but he was happy they weren’t there, because he saw at the edge of the construction zone a turquoise-colored portable toilet.

  Bumping over a break in the sidewalk and skidding to a stop in the dirt, Steve unbuckled his shoulder harness, bent over and rummaged through his suitcase in the backseat. He grabbed two shirts and a pair of jeans. From the front seat, he picked up two bottles of Sparkletts water and, wrapping everything in a bundle made from one of the shirts, he opened the car door and hurried into the Porta Potti.

  As he suspected, there was neither mirror nor sink, only a horrible-smelling chemical toilet, but he locked the door, took off his shirt and pants, and dumped them into the metal bowl. Opening up one of the water bottles, he poured it onto the extra shirt and used it to scrub his face. He couldn’t see what he looked like, but it had to be better than before, and he took a section of sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead, cheeks and chin. The material came back clean save for a few pinkish smears, so he assumed he looked all right.