Act of Love (2011)

by Joe R. Lansdale

  *

  At precisely the same time, Captain Fredricks radioed Sergeant Mitchel in the Volkswagen bus, informed him that Joe Clark was on his way and that he was to be the second inside man. He then asked how Hanson and the family were.

  "Asleep. All asleep," Mitchel lied.

  "Good, and I'm fixin' to be, too, just as soon as I can get back to the house."

  Fredricks signed off, turned off his car radio and went back inside. He could sleep soundly now. All was well.

  *

  Mitchel used his walkie-talkie to contact Martinez. "Where the fuck's Hanson?" "I told you. He went out for beer." "He's taking his sweetass time. The Captain just called. I lied. Told him Hanson was asleep. He finds out and it's my ass and I'm takin' yours with me."

  "It's all our asses. But don't sweat. He'll be back. He said he was going to take his time."

  "You should never have let him out of the house."

  "No sweat," Martinez said, but his voice lacked conviction. "It'll all come out in the wash."

  "Try this on for size. Fredricks is sending over Joe Clark to be the second man inside."

  "Yeah. Now?"

  "Now. I don't know him, but they say he's one good cop, sticks pretty tight by the rules."

  "I've seen him. But if he's Hanson's partner he won't rat. Like father like son, like partner like partner."

  "Yeah, well remember, your partner's off the force. Little something about accepting a bribe."

  "Go to hell, Mitchel."

  "We'll be better in hell than anywhere else if Fredricks gets wind of this," Mitchel clicked off.

  Shit, Martinez thought to himself. Mitchel's in a panic. Everything's cool. Hanson will be back shortly, and Clark's bound to be one of the boys. He'll want a beer like the rest of us.

  Sure, one of the boys.

  SUNDAY ... 4 a.m. AND COUNTING

  An ornamental brick wall showed briefly in the headlights. It broke open into a drive. Hanson whipped in and killed the lights almost in the same move.

  No other car was visible. The garage was locked up tight. There were no lights in the house and no one was waiting in the drive. Only the shrubbery seemed alive, swaying and whipping to the beat of the rain and the gust of the wind.

  Hanson sat a moment, considered. Perhaps he had the address wrong. He was thinking it over when a shadow disengaged itself from the shrubbery and the door on the passenger's side jerked open.

  *

  It wasn't cold in the house, but Rachel shivered.

  She hadn't even tried to go back to bed. Instead, driven by a strange, uncontrollable fear, she had gone to the closet and found a large, brown, paper bag. She set it on her dresser and reached inside, took a hammer from amongst hundreds of loose nails. She had used the hammer and nails to install her new curtains three months ago. She had not even thought of the hammer until now; until fear and gloom settled on her like the dark shadow of death.

  She felt the weight of the hammer in her palm.

  God, she was considering hitting someone with it. Could she do it?

  She looked at JoAnna sleeping.

  Uh huh. She could do it.

  Joe Clark checked his watch: 4:15. Not much farther. Another fifteen or twenty minutes to Pasadena, and then maybe twenty minutes more. He shook out a cigarette and lit it with the car lighter. He smoked calmly. Drove reasonably.

  Hanson was startled at first, but then he realized the wet figure sliding in beside him was Barlowe.

  "What the ..." Hanson began.

  "Make the block," Barlowe said quickly.

  "Look . . ."

  "Just make the fuckin' block, all right?"

  Hanson stared at Barlowe a moment. "All right," he said. He backed out and started around the block, driving slowly.

  "You know this place?" Barlowe asked.

  "The address?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Do you know it?"

  "No. First time I've been here."

  "I know you know a guy named Milo in Evidence."

  "I know him."

  "That's his house."

  "Okay. That's Milo's house. You tryin' to tell me he's the man I want?"

  "No. I'm trying to tell you he's dead, mothafucker."

  "What?"

  "Just drive and listen . . . Go on down this block, make two or three, this might take a bit."

  "You call the cops? . . . What's this got to do with anything?"

  "It's got to do with The Hacker, asshole, and you're a cop. I called you, didn't I? First off. I don't like your black ass at all, and I don't give a fuck about you. I want this scoop. That's the deal. Plain and simple. But this can help us both. You want to listen?"

  "Tell me all about it."

  "All right. Here's the telegram version. Milo * was selling evidence to me."

  "So it was him?"

  "Uh huh. I was using what he gave me to write my articles. A cop, your partner, Joe Clark got wise to what Milo was doing. Milo tried to swear off the dirty bucks, but he couldn't. He had that cretin kid."

  "Not a cretin. He has cerebral palsy."

  "A damn geek, anyway. He needed the money. He kept coming back for more. He told me this Clark was on his ass closer'n a dingleberry. He was worried sick. Tonight he calls me, says, look I've got something for you. I told him I thought he'd said it was all over. He said it was, but this one was a biggie. Could I get him a thousand? I told him I could get him a thousand about the same time I sprouted a new set of ears. And then he says, for this you can. I know who The Hacker is.

  "I tell him, all right, if it's good enough I can get you the jack. But this better not be no con. I don't go much for gettin' up in the middle of the night for no con. He says, this is the straight goods.

  "So I drive over here. Lights were on. The door was unlocked. No one answered the bell. I leaned on the door and went in. I found the jello kid in the hallway. His brains are all over the wall. The old gal's in the back bedroom, same condition, and Milo was in his study, what was left of his head is all over the desk. There was an automatic with a silencer in his hand."

  "Suicide."

  "Nope. A plant. No nitrate smell on the hand, and the gun's been forced into it. The finger on the trigger guard has a bruise on it and the nail's snapped off. Someone killed the kid and the old lady and Milo. Tried to make it look like a suicide. The Hacker's who."

  "That's not his style."

  "The bastard's no fool, Hanson. He knew Milo was onto him. He must have planned on getting him tonight. Milo waited until he was sure his family was asleep, then called me. Just so happened he got the call to me before The Hacker arrived to kill the family and rig the suicide."

  "Jesus."

  "I know for sure it was The Hacker. The evidence is in the house. I could have brought it out, but I wanted you to see it, shall we say, in its natural habitat."

  "We need to call the law in."

  "We will. When I found the bodies I cut the lights and waited out in the shrubbery for you. My car's parked down the block from Milo's. I think you should park behind it and we should walk up. Safer that way."

  "All right, Barlowe. But if you're trying to be cute, I'm going to snap your neck like a dry chicken bone."

  "Don't say," Barlowe said. "Excuse me while I perspire with fear."

  Hanson clenched his teeth, remained silent. He drove around the block and back toward Milo's place. He stopped when Barlowe said, "That's my car over there. Pull up behind it."

  Hanson parked, got out. Barlowe stood with his arms resting on the open door, the rain beating down on him. He pinched a package of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook a damp one out. He fumbled with the pack, dropped it back inside the car.

  Hanson came around in front of the car. Watching Barlowe he couldn't resist, "Old Hard as Nails Barlowe isn't nervous, is he?"

  Barlowe bent down across the seat, came up with his cigarettes.

  "No," he said calmly closing the car door. "Just clumsy. 'Sides, sumbitches is soaked." He pushed the
damp cigarette back into the pack, slipped it in his pocket.

  "Come on, " Hanson said. "I'm drowning."

  The two men walked briskly toward the house.

  *

  Inside was the smell of death, blood and excrement. The movies give death glamour. A body flailing back from the force of a shot, a sudden stream of blood squirting up. In real life it's uglier, far uglier. At the instant of death the sphincter muscles often let go. There's the sudden nauseous smell of internal gases and excrement. The body sometimes twists and knots into convulsive positions, hardens as rigor mortis sets in. Humanity leaves the body like a butterfly leaves a cocoon. What remains is a shell. A hard, dead, stinking shell.

  That was what was left of the Milo family. Shells.

  The boy was in the hall. Crusting gore and grey matter clung to the wall behind him. He was clothed in pajamas. His head was a mess; like a ripe watermelon dropped from twenty stories.

  Hanson turned on his cop stomach. He had seen it many times. He never ever got used to it.

  Barlowe seemed as bored as a tour guide. He led Hanson down the hall to a back bedroom. The door was open. Barlowe took out his wallet, used the edge of it to flick on the light.

  A woman—her body led Hanson to believe she had been in her thirties—lay on the bed, dressed only in underpants. There was not the least bit of seductiveness about her. She had half a face. The right side of her head was an explosion of blood and gristle. The shot had entered her right eye. Around her head was a mushroom cloud of grey matter and gore matted with flesh and hair.

  Barlowe walked over to the body. "I think," he said, "that the shot was delivered while she slept. Close range." Barlowe raised his hand and pointed his finger at the woman. "Bang. Like that."

  "We'll get snapshots for your collection later. Come on. Get out of here. Show me what you're going to show me and let's call some law."

  "Sure," Barlowe said, shrugging. He followed Hanson out, used his wallet to flick off the light.

  "This way," Barlowe said, and he edged around Hanson, walked briskly, his tour guide role resumed.

  *

  Milo lay on the floor next to the overturned study chair. Using his handkerchief, Hanson turned on the desk lamp. There was blood all over the desk. He took a good look at Milo. The shot had entered just above his right ear and come out near the top of his head on the left side. It looked as if some huge and ravenous animal had eaten its way out of his skull. The flesh was folded back and a glob of brains swelled out of his head. The eyes were the color of sun-dried slate.

  Hanson went around behind the desk and knelt down close to the body, examined the hand that held the automatic with silencer. Barlowe was right. He had to give the ghoulish bastard credit for that. The gun had been forced into Milo's hand.

  "Figure the lad heard something," Barlowe said, "waddled out of his room for a look and caught a slug. The killer then killed Milo and after that the wife, came back in here and tried to rig the gun for a suicide."

  Hanson nodded. "Looks that way."

  "Now here's the interesting part. Milo must have been writing out what he knew on this pad." Barlowe picked a pencil from his soaked shirt pocket and tapped a yellow legal pad on Milo's desk. "The killer, having done what he set out to do, took what Milo was writing. You see, Milo was going to hand over the evidence to me. I'd give him the thousand, and the paper would get a big scoop."

  "Get on with it, Barlowe. This may be a barrel of laughs to you, but I'm getting sick to my stomach."

  "Milo told me last thing over the phone that the killer was Joe Clark." Barlowe paused for effect. Hanson didn't bat an eye. "You don't look surprised."

  "I'm not."

  "Maybe you're not so stupid after all."

  "No. I'll give you a point there. I've been awful damn stupid."

  "Clark ran him out of the file room one night when he caught him Xeroxing some papers on The Hacker. Next day Milo noticed that the Xerox counter was up twenty pages from the number he'd left it."

  "So anybody could have used it."

  "You sign in for it, don't you?"

  "You're supposed to."

  "Uh huh. Well Milo says no one had signed but yet it had been used, and the night before when Clark caught Milo he ran him out, told him he'd lock up. Know how many pages were in that file?"

  "Twenty."

  "Bingo. He was copying it for himself. Staying one step ahead."

  "He didn't need to do that. He had access anytime he wanted. We were working on the case together."

  "Good enough. But I think he wanted that material close at hand. Maybe he wanted to falsify it. I'll tell you why I'm sure he must have had ulterior motives, or rather I'll show you."

  Barlowe went around to the end of the desk, stood by Hanson. He picked up the pad. "Look close." He handed it to Hanson.

  Hanson took the pad and squinted his eyes. He held it beneath the desk lamp.

  "That must have been the page underneath what Milo was writing. He was either finishing off his statement, or starting a new page. You can see it, can't you?"

  Hanson didn't answer. He could make out most of it very well, but to be sure he put the pad on the desk and took Barlowe's pencil from him. He shaded over the indentations very carefully with the side of the pencil lead.

  therefore I'm certain that the killer must be

  none other than the department's own Joe Clark. Besides the evidence already presented . . .

  The rest of the writing was either too soft to have left an indentation or Milo had been cut off in mid-sentence.

  "Well," Barlowe said.

  "Clark's one dead sonofabitch." Hanson (lashed on an image of his daughter and wife hacked to ribbons.

  "He must have rigged this so as not to draw more attention to the department. If it were a Hacker murder, and the victim a cop—"

  "It would just draw more attention to him," Hanson finished.

  "Looks that way to me."

  "Listen. You'll get your goddamned scoop. You just drive straight to my house and tell the cops the score. They're a couple of detectives in a Volkswagen bus out front. A couple out back, and one inside. Tell them I sent you. Don't tell them I'm going to Clark's. You keep your mouth shut on that score and I'll see that you get the best interview of your life; an interview with the man that blew The Houston Hacker's brains out."

  Hanson knelt down, tore the automatic from Milo's dead fingers.

  "It's a deal."

  "Hand me that phone book. I'm going to need Joe's address."

  "Don't know your own partner's address?"

  "Just give me the fuckin' phone book Barlowe, or you get to join Milo."

  "No need to be testy." Barlowe picked up the telephone with his shirt tail, eased the phone book out from beneath it. He flipped it open, looked up Clark. He used the pad on the desk and his pencil that Hanson had cast aside and wrote Clark, and then under that the address.

  Hanson took it, read it quickly and jammed it in his shirt pocket. He leaned over and tore the paper with Milo's fragmentary statement from the pad, and shoved it too in his shirt pocket.

  "You know where I live?" Hanson asked.

  "I do. It won't take me long to get there."

  "Drive slow. I need all the time I can get."

  "Sure."

  Hanson pushed the automatic in his waistband and started out. Barlowe took a last look at Milo's body and flicked off the light.

  SUNDAY . . . 4:47 p.m. AND COUNTING

  It all seemed like a nightmare. Things had happened so fast Hanson had been unable to absorb the reality of it. It was as he thought, as he had deeply suspected for some time: Joe Clark was The Hacker. Joe, his partner, his friend. Could Joe be a split personality? Could one half of him be a friend, the other half a murderer? Doc Warren had suggested the possibility.

  Should part of him hate Clark the fiend, another love Clark the friend? It all seemed so goddamned impossible.

  But perhaps Clark knew who he was all along. Perha
ps there was but one cold, calculating personality that could offer a friendly side when the need arose.

  Whatever, the man had to be exterminated.

  "It could be you or me," Warren had said. "It's in all of us."

  Not true, Hanson told himself. And then a hard realization came over him. If it's not true, why am I driving seventy miles an hour on a rainslick highway to blow a man's brains out without benefit of judge, jury and executioner.

  No, it's true. We are all, deep down, the primeval beast, and it was far too late to change directions now.

  *

  Hanson reached Clark's apartment at 5:22 a.m. He climbed the stairs to the second level, checked the door numbers carefully. He took the automatic from his waistband and held it tightly in his hand. Just before he raised his large foot to kick in the door he thought, can I kill Joe?

  The door lock gave way without a fight. Hanson hit the floor rolling, came up in darkness, his head against something hard, a table.

  Nothing moved in the apartment.

  His eyes accustomed themselves to the dark. Carefully he surveyed the room. He could see a bed ... an empty bed.

  He stood up slowly, half crouched.

  No one jumped out to get him.

  He eased back to the wall and turned on the light. He could see the kitchenette, the dining area, the bedroom-living room combination and the open door to the bathroom. He didn't see Joe.

  He closed the door he had kicked open.

  He checked the bathroom.

  Nothing but the smell of clean towels and fresh soap lurked in the toilet area. Somehow Hanson was surprised. He had expected the apartment to be more run-down. But it was clean, organized and fresh smelling. Even the ashtrays were empty. Joe lived in a rather run-down section of Houston, but his apartment was as nice as he could make it. An expensive stereo resided on a specially built cabinet with speakers. A color T.V. was next to that. There were rows and rows of books. And there was a desk, a typewriter on top, and a leatherbound book beside it.