Act of Love (2011)

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Doc Warren, leading the pair with his stiff walk (Clark often joked to Hanson that Warren's vulture faced appearance and stiff walk were due to the fact that he was just one of the corpses that got bored down there and applied for a job), directed them to the lounge, and after the men were seated, he told them this about the corpse.

  "It's unofficial, mind you, until I've made an autopsy, but from preliminary examination, I'd say the slash on her throat was the one that killed her. No Sherlock Holmes there. Nobody lives with their head dangling by a string—not unless they're the Frankenstein monster. I think he cut her throat and hacked on down to the bone in a frenzy."

  "He killed her in anger?" Hanson asked.

  "No. I mean frenzy. I mean it in the same way it's used to describe the feeding insanity of sharks and piranha. An uncontrollable urge, a temporary madness. In this case joy at the sight of blood and pain, or so I guess. The neck was hacked to pieces. You saw that."

  "Don't remind me," Hanson said.

  "Any of the other wounds were enough to do her in, the stomach for instance, but that would have taken longer. From the looks of the cuts on her hands and feet, and the nicks below her eyelids, I'd say he tortured her some. Removal of the lips, sexual organs, that's not uncommon in crimes like this."

  "He did all that?" Hanson asked.

  "You weren't looking very close," Warren said.

  "I admit I didn't get down on my hands and knees and sniff."

  Warren made a sour smile. "He stuffed those items into the ripped cavity of her stomach."

  "Christ," Hanson said softly.

  "He also knocked out a couple of her front teeth, probably when he was forcing her panties down her throat. The missing eye—which the investigating officer discovered in the alley—was probably dug out with the point of a sharp instrument. Most likely, considering the damage to the eye socket and the lid, something bigger than a knife. A sword or bayonet maybe. I think after killing her he was working on the body when this man—what's his name?—I have a terrible memory for those reports ..."

  Like hell you do, thought Hanson, but he said, "Smokey, or at least that's what's on your preliminary report from Higgins."

  "Yes. Well, when this Smokey came up he had to leave her. Or maybe he just quit. Her arms were bound behind her back with her pants. That and the gag meant he planned to stay awhile."

  "She raped?" Hanson asked.

  "Can tell you later for sure. Probably. I can tell you this much. According to what the officer found after his search in the alley, and after reading his report and making my preliminary examination of the body, it's a certainty that the killer sliced off the breasts and took them with him."

  "Sonofabitch," Clark said.

  "And he just took his time," Hanson said. "Right there in the goddamned alley, easy as you please."

  "People aren't exactly the investigative type down there," Doc Warren said. "Besides, that's part of the thrill for this guy. The fear of discovery. Sex offenders—and this is a sex crime, I'll stake my reputation on that—get off to that sort of thing. It heightens the act for them. It was probably that way with Jack The Ripper, The Zodiac Killer, The Boston Strangler and The Skid Row Slasher. All those crimes were committed right under people's noses. I think we've got a real screwo here. 'Course I'm not a psychiatrist, but I'd say he's a necrophiliac—a dead body lover; a dismemberer. That's why I say he wasn't finished with the body yet. I think he just got started with the head. The arms and the legs were next.

  "You know, Hitler was reputed to be a necrophiliac. I read once where a mutilated soldier's body excited him so much, they practically had to drag him off the battlefield."

  "Yeah," Clark said. "I think I've heard that story, too."

  "But this guy," Hanson said, "he's going to try and pull this sort of thing again, isn't he? He's going to make it a string. Right?"

  "I'm no clairvoyant," Doc Warren said, "but from what I've seen in the past, and I've seen quite a bit in the many years I've been at this, and from what I've read and studied—and I admit to a certain morbid fascination with this sort of thing ..."

  "We always figured you were sort of . . . special ... to want to do this sort of work in the first place," Clark said dryly.

  Warren smiled, unoffended. "I'd say, my friends, just between us chickens, guessing you understand, this is probably just the beginning."

  MONDAY . . . 7:02 a.m.

  Dead tired, wishing at times like this that he lived closer to the precinct than the Pasadena suburb, Hanson drove home. He had moved to Pasadena some five years ago to get away from the hustle and bustle of Houston. He was shocked to discover how few blacks lived there. But the transition had been relatively easy once the neighbors discovered that he didn't hang huge, foam rubber dice from his rearview mirror and attach indiscriminate numbers of curb feelers to all his automobiles. For that matter, he didn't even like watermelon, peanut patties and RC Colas. He had been known to drop down on a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, however, and there wasn't a black-eyed pea or a slice of white bread safe in the house. His growing paunch was testimony to that.

  Sometimes it bothered him to think he might have moved into the Pasadena neighborhood because it was "without color," as his old granddaddy had been fond of saying. He never thought of himself as being a radical. He wasn't ashamed of being black, but then again he wasn't proud of it either. He hadn't really had much say in the matter. What he was proud of was the fact that he had pulled himself up and out of that ghetto by his bootstraps, and his family would never know what it was to be hungry, cold and miserable. He knew what his relatives thought of him, most of them anyway. Behind his back they called him an Uncle Tom, a laundried nigger, a honkey lover and a white black man. The hell with them. Let them be black in the ghetto. He'd be black here in Pasadena in his cozy two-story brick house. It wasn't a fancy house. It wasn't really different than the others on the block, but it was his and The Savings And Loans'.

  Tonight, however, these thoughts were merely fleeting diversions. The color scheme of Pasadena was the least of his worries. There was that nagging slab scene whirling around in the back of his brain. He hated it. He tried to cover it with other thoughts, but like a drowning victim, it eventually surfaced. Christ! She hadn't even looked like something human.

  He tried to think of other things. Anything. He thought of home. Considered what he would do when he got there. He was tired but too keyed up to sleep. Perhaps he would eat a bite and read, and maybe, just maybe, he'd wake Rachel and see if he could find a bit of warmth there. But no, on second thought that wouldn't be such a good idea. First he had come in late last night from work and she had awakened. She always had been a light sleeper. And then there was the phone call this morning that put him on this crazy murder. No, a third awakening would not put Rachel in an amorous mood. He would stay buddies longer, and have a better sex life overall, if he let her have that extra hour of sleep before she prepared for work and driving JoAnna to school.

  But at least she was there. Just knowing she was there was enough. It made his whole miserable job worthwhile.

  It had to be worse for Joe. Living alone, divorced from Peggy after only a year of marriage. Nothing for him to do but go home to darkness and walls. After the divorce Joe had moved, and not once had Hanson been to visit. He didn't even know where Joe lived anymore. He had left Peggy the house and rented an apartment, but he never said where. They were partners and friends, but when their shift was done they went their separate ways and lived their separate lives.

  But Joe was lonely. Hanson knew that. You don't have a man for a partner three years straight, a man you see more often than your wife, (perhaps part of the reason Joe was no longer married; perhaps part of the reason so many cops were no longer married) and not know something about him, not sense changes in his behaviour and see the sadness in his eyes.

  Those thoughts gave way again to Bella. Cut, ripped, mauled. The victim of a modern day werewolf.

  *

>   Hanson parked his blue, '75 Chrysler at the curb. The drive was full of Rachel's Buick and the old '55 yellow Chevy that he was going to fix and paint one of these days. Yeah. One of these days.

  He sniffed the early morning air as he stepped from the Chrysler. Nothing like a lungful of pollution to start your morning. Pasadena, Texas wasn't nicknamed Stink- adena for nothing. In an odd way, this morning reminded him of mornings in The Ward. The odor was different, industrial puke instead of garbage, wine, sweat and urine, but it was still sickening. It made him long for those summer mornings on his granddaddy's farm.

  That had been paradise.

  Crystal clear air, long drives from the farm into Tyler, Texas to buy supplies and what his granddaddy called staples: flour, sugar and salt. And then back to the fresh, tart smells of vegetable rows and new mown hay.

  He had inherited that farm after his grand-daddy had passed. But by then he was a grown man living in Houston and working for the police department. Last time he had seen the farm the house and barns were grey and stripping with the work of the weather. The fields were tall with weeds and grass. His brother, who had inherited nothing except black skin, tried to get him to sell it. But he would never sell. Never. Someday he would go back there, and someday that farm would smell of animals and vegetables again.

  Someday.

  Christ! Hanson thought. It's awful damn early in the morning to be philosophical. As he closed the Chrysler door night was fading at the edges, giving over to the day. That was supposed to symbolize something. The turning of confusion into order. The rebirth of the Phoenix.

  Fat chance. Not in Houston, Texas. There would never be a new dawn for that world of concrete, steel, pollution and crowded human flesh. Each day was another wallow in the slush. More death and destruction, and one more job for one more cop.

  Day one every morning.

  Day one forever.

  It was like being a janitor. You could come in on schedule, sweep and mop, wax and throw out the garbage. But next day it was right back again, sometimes worse than the day before. You never made real progress. You just kept it where folks could walk for a few hours without getting bubblegum on their shoes. It was the same way with a cop. Temporary order, nothing more—and that, precarious order at best.

  Poor Bella. A street whore swept out with the rest of the slush.

  *

  The house was dark.

  Upstairs Rachel would be sleeping, soft- brown and snug in the blankets. In less than a half-hour she would be up and at it. Dragging JoAnna out of bed and getting her off to school and herself off to work.

  Next year JoAnna had college. What a nag. Money, money, money. More money than a cop with a mortgage and too many bills could afford. But he'd manage somehow. He and Rachel always did. That was his motto: "We'll manage."

  He unlocked the door and slipped inside, went to the kitchen, turned on the light and went to the refrigerator. He opened the door and felt the cold, frosty breath of the machine.

  . . . Cold. That's what preserved bodies. Bodies like Bella's . . .

  He got a glass down and poured himself a glass of milk. It was tasteless. He couldn't get Bella off his mind. A woman he didn't even know. A cheap streetwalker with about as much class as bubblegum jewelry. But there was no way he could push it out of his brain.

  Not with the worries of others; not with worries and thoughts of his own. She was there as if she had been burned in with a branding iron.

  What a fucked up job. All hours of the day or night he was on call. Eat fast, sleep light and keep running. Never a break. Never a moment's peace. Run, run, run, and visit with the dead.

  Hanson took a green plastic bowl of tuna mix from the refrigerator and a loaf of bread from the shelf. He took a fork from the utensil drawer and spread tuna on bread, poured himself another glass of milk. He sat at the kitchen table and ate, not tasting the food or the milk. When he was finished he put the bowl in the sink and ran water into it. That was something he tried never to forget, because if he did, boy did Rachel give him hell.

  "Makes the washing easier," she'd say.

  Next Christmas he was going to get her a dishwasher. No more hot suds for his baby.

  He filled the glass with water and set it in the sink next to the bowl. He put the fork in the glass and put the milk and bread away. Wished too late that he had put a slice of cheese on his sandwich. He turned off the kitchen light, went into the livingroom and flipped on the light. The room was paneled in red mahogony—what room there was to see. Most of the walls were hidden by rows of bookshelves. He may have grown up poor, he may have lived in the ghetto, but his grand- daddy had taught him to read and to love books. As a child he had owned one prize possession: A library card. It was hell for him to get to the library, but when he made it he always checked out his limit. In the summers he practically lived there behind one of those long, wooden tables; a world tucked firmly between his fingers; a world made up of paper, ink and imagination.

  His brother Evan couldn't even read and write his name. He had become a boxer. He wasn't very successful at his trade. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't great either, just second- rate. I should have been the boxer, Hanson thought. I've got the hands for it, the chin and the heart. That was all his brother had had—heart. A heart like a stallion.

  In a back alley not far from where Bella had been found, a teenager full of smack put a switchblade knife in that stallion-like heart for three dollars and forty-seven cents. And that was all for Bubba The Kid Hanson. Just another, cold, dead nigger with a blade in his pump.

  Death. It was certainly on his mind tonight. It was as if suddenly the bowl of his head had filled up with all the death it could stand and was overrunning like a clogged toilet. Twenty years on the force, and tonight, he felt as if he were coming to the end of his rope.

  Maybe it was all the years of thinking of yourself as one of the good guys, arresting scum and seeing them on the street the next day due to some hotshot lawyer with all the scruples of a Gestapo agent. Yeah, maybe that was it, and maybe he should say the hell with it all.

  At least for the moment that was exactly what he was going to do. The hell with it.

  Hanson walked about the room, ran his fingers along the spines of the books. What did he want to read? He needed something to distract him; something to suck up his self- pity; something to rest him. Tired or not, he was too geared for sleep. He touched Chandler's The Big Sleep. Nope. Too real for tonight. His fingers caressed The Glory of the Hummingbird by De Vries. Yep that was it. Light, fast and well written. He chose the leather chair next to the window, parted the curtains a bit before sitting down, and then holding the book up to the glowing light, he began to read. He read until the words rode each other piggy back and the book dropped from his big, limp hand.

  *

  And he dreamed.

  In the dream Bella, cut and bloody, her head dangling by a strand of ragged flesh, rose from the slab in the morgue and walked. Zombie-like she walked, every step puddling pools of cold, inky blood. Her hands were no longer bound behind her back by her green, sequined pants. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. Her ripped torso dripped entrails. Intestines hung so low that she nearly stepped on them. Slowly she raised one bloody hand and pointed a finger at Hanson. He could not see himself in the dream, but he knew the finger was pointed at him. Her lipless mouth opened, moved, but no sound came out. She came closer. Her mouth was still moving. Blood leaked at the Corners but still no sound. She reached out with her red streaked hand to touch Hanson.

  "Wha . . .!"

  Hanson came awake, Rachel's hand resting on his shoulder.

  "Marve," she said. "You okay?"

  "Huh ..." Light streamed through the window, lay across his body in yellow slats. The Glory of the Hummingbird lay in his lap. Rachel, smooth as silk, the color of creamed coffee, smiled the smile.

  "You were having a nightmare," she said, sitting down on the arm of the chair. She was wearing a plaid, ankle-length robe. It w
asn't the sort of outfit that would look good on most women, but Rachel wasn't like most women. Hanson could smell her just-out-of-the- shower, fresh-soaped scent. She picked up the book. "De Vries gave you a nightmare?"

  "No. Not De Vries."

  Rachel's dark, brown eyes became serious. "What then?"

  Hanson smiled, reached up to touch her thick afro hairdo. On the sides and the back it was almost to her shoulders.

  "You have very nice hair," Hanson said.

  "The nightmare, Marve. What was it about?"

  "Work."

  "About work?"

  "Work brought it on."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Nothing to tell really . . . Little something just got to me, that's all."

  "What got to you? You never have nightmares. I only remember you having one nightmare ever, and that was too many tacos that caused that."

  "I still wince at the thought."

  "About last night."

  "There was a murder."

  "I don't mean to sound cold, but in your business, isn't there always?"

  "Yeah. But this one was different. Pressure is getting to me, I guess. It'll pass. Just too much blood this time."

  "You need a vacation."

  "Yeah. Maybe it's just an accumulation of years and bodies. No big thing."

  "You still haven't told me about it."

  "Honey, it's nothing ... I mean it's nothing you want to hear."

  "If it's bothering you let me hear it. Talking it out might help."

  Hanson put his arm around her waist, pulled her off the chair arm and into his lap. He ran his fingers through her hair, wondering as he often did, what a beautiful woman like Rachel saw in a gorilla like him. He took the book from her hand and dropped it on the carpet. He said, "Kiss me, you fool."