by Rex Miller
“Sure. Two-thirty all right?"
“Fine,” he said, glancing at his watch. It wasn't even eleven yet. He'd nap for an hour. Eat a bowl of soup. He went out his private office exit, closing the door, checking to make sure it had locked, and turned to see a familiar face waiting there in the parking lot of the clinic.
If Ray Meara hadn't been tired and ill to begin with, he'd have taken a clearer look at the bedside clock and seen that it was not shortly before eleven but more like two minutes before nine, and that his clock had stopped at eleven the night before. Had he started the day armed with this small piece of knowledge he might not have hurried, and he probably wouldn't have ended up stepping off the submerged guardrail of the Mark Road Bridge.
But Meara did hurry, and he did step from a boat directly into a deep ditch filled with ice-cold river water, and he was still in shock, not to mention injured (though unbeknownst to him at the time), when he found the frightening note and book left for him at the motel office. Within minutes he knew that Sharon had never returned from her foolhardy confrontation, that the cops were not about to lock Dr. Royal up for murder, and that Royal and Shtolz were one.
Meara, still on his feet but barely operating, simply refused to grasp the fact that such a note as he held in his hand, together with the missing-persons list that now included Sharon, were insufficient evidence to cause the constabulary to immediately arrest the town's leading citizen as a mass murderer.
He fought back the urge to scream in Jimmie Randall's face. He knew the reaction that would cause. The cops were “concerned,” and Doc would be brought in for “intensive questioning,” but it was “too early” to be sure Sharon Kamen had disappeared, and the words began to form a bullshit cloud, hanging oppressively in the air that Meara was finding more difficult to breathe by the minute. He finally dialed a local lawyer named Stephen Ellis, whom he'd heard was gutsy and aggressive.
In a breathless avalanche of words he sketched it out for Ellis. “I wanna do something. I got to stop this guy. What about a citizen's arrest? Isn't there such a thing?"
“Sure. You can arrest somebody. You arrest Doc Royal, let's say. He gets a lawyer and countersues you for false arrest. Now the jury awards him your farm. That's the way that could work."
“But he might be getting set to disappear himself. What if he gets away with this shit? I gotta do something. I know he's done something to Sharon and—” He was beside himself. “I gotta stop him!"
“Okay. I'll be down there as soon as I can. Stay at the motel and wait for me. We'll go to the courthouse and—” on and on. Papers. Warrants. A U.S. marshal would blah blah. The sheriff would do such. He would make bail. You would do this, he would do that. Meara thanked the man and hung up, went outside, and tried to breathe as the bullshit cloud filled the room behind him.
Double pneumonia, both lungs, overpoweringly potent even in its incipiency, ravaged Meara's system, which was already unbalanced by the trauma of the boating accident. Later, he'd learn that as he stepped off the bridge rail, left foot first, the weight of the boat had brought some three to four hundred pounds of steel rushing up to clip him on the spine, then again at the base of the skull, as the tippy boat fought to right itself. The plunge into frigid water had shocked him so totally that he never identified or remembered the two fast blows as he went over the side.
The massive shock of realization that the town's leading citizen, a kindly man he'd known for years, had a monstrous alter ego—this, and Sharon's situation—combined with his physical deterioration to pull him further down.
Once again, a quirk of timing played a part. Had Meara begun his day in a normal fashion, and showed up at Jimmie Randall's office only a short while later, things might have proceeded in a far different way. Twenty-one minutes after Meara left the city administration building to return to Sharon's motel, praying she'd suddenly appear or call, a truck driver found Sharon and called the police, the Bayou City ambulance service, and the Clearwater County sheriff's office. But Ray's timing was bad.
It was a brain-addled, desperate, and violently angry Raymond Meara, both physically and mentally impaired, who stumbled from his pickup in front of the Royal Clinic at 10:43 A.M. He figured it was after noon, and his plan was to wait for the man to return from lunch and arrest him for the murders.
His brain signals were malfunctioning and all he could think of was revenge. Royal must not be permitted to escape. He reached in and unholstered the pistol in the glove compartment, holding it down under the dash as he racked a round into the chamber and thumbed the safety off. Cocked and locked.
He turned, shock, grief, pain, trauma, double pneumonia taking him under, as the man he was after appeared at the side of the building, saying something to him and laughing, and very slowly, as if in a drugged state, every move on slo-mo, he laboriously pulled the weapon from his belt and said to his old friend, saintly Doc Royal, “You're under arrest you son of a bitch,” pointing his firearm at him as he'd been trained to do, the words sounding inside his head as if they'd been pulled through axle grease and molasses.
“YOU'RE UNDER ARREST YOU SONNNNNNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnn and on and on, a long, unending nnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^of pain that became a WALL OF SCREAMING NOISE THAT WAS BOTH QUIET PISTOL SHOT AND WOMAN'S TERROR-STRICKEN SCREAM.
How the finger touched the trigger and why he felt as if he were passing out and what made him squeeze that trigger before he fainted he could never be certain.
Ray retained hazy images of a man and woman there in the parking lot, the woman screaming again and again as if someone had dropped a mouse down her dress, and somebody else looking at him from the passenger side of a parked car.
He looked down at old Doc, either dead or very close to dying, with a CCI Stinger having just gone in through the face, exploding the brain on its way out, or so it appeared, Raymond shivering, not fainting after all, finding the strength to go back and put the gun on the floorboard beside a small, leather-bound book that he'd knocked off the seat.
He sat in the truck waiting to hear the siren, wondering who would show up first, Jimmie Randall or Eddie Roddenberg or some other asshole, coughing, looking at the weapon and the book, the word Lebensborn mocking him with its golden eagle and swastika.
64
Clearwater County Jail
Meara was a man deep in confusion. Hurt held him pinned. On the physical level he ached from a beating, but he'd had a few beatings before. At least one rib was broken, but he'd broken his share of ribs. The confusion—that was new: a muddy, inconscient thing that pushed at the limits of his sanity, washing across him in dirty waves of disorientation.
The man next to him whispered in a strange, hoarse voice, “—and you know, man, it ain't bad, but you're putting in all these hours and that's when you get hurt ‘n’ shit, when you don't concentrate. “Concentrate, the man whispered, and Meara, whose wrists, ankles, and waist were joined by jailhouse iron, tried to concentrate. The hurt stabbed his chest when he inhaled, held his chest like a vise, throbbed across the side of his head. His tongue found another point of soreness.
“So this big sumbitch comes back where we wuz playin’ poker ‘n’ he goes, kin I put my stuff over here? And this one ole boy, he says shit no, you cain't dump on nat, it's my bunk, shitbird. And hell, man, you know how it iz inna Navy, it's root hog or grunt!" The man laughed in his strange, whispery rasp.
The sign to Meara's left read Out Of Bounds.
“So, shit, I stand up ‘n’ say to this big dufus, we got rules here, boy. This dufus goes whatdyamean, man? And I say, hey, dufus, it's root hog or die, motherfucker!"
Behind them an authoritative flat voice barked, “No talking, assholes.” Meara filed it away for future reference.
To the left was out of bounds, and in this place there were no talking assholes permitted. As if to underscore this wisdom, heavy steel slammed behind them. Meara took a deep breath and winced from the sharp pain. A sign in front of him p
roclaimed Danger. Below that: Stand Clear While Gate Is In Motion.
This was more information than he could digest. The lights were dim. He fell, but there was no sensation when he smacked the hard surface, wrapped in perplexing ignominy and jailhouse iron. By the time he regained consciousness he was a news story. The front page of a sixteen-page newspaper:
BAYOU CITY MAN CHARGED IN SHOOTING
by Isabel Santora of the Bootheel-Republic staff
A Bayou City man has been charged in the attempted murder of retired physician Solomon Royal, 70, of the Royal Clinic of Bayou City.
The man is Raymond Meara, whose address is listed as Star Route, and who is said to live on a farm approximately twelve miles south of Bayou City, in the community of Bayou Ridge. Meara has been charged with attempted homicide.
He is accused of shooting Royal in front of his clinic at West Vine and Petrie streets at about 10:45 A.M. yesterday.
Sheriff Pritchett said, “From what we can tell, Mr. Meara was carrying a pistol with him and had parked near the clinic. Eyewitnesses say he walked up to Doc Royal and shot at him, point blank. Fortunately he's a lousy shot and the bullet barely grazed Doc on the side of the face. He lost a lot of blood but they got him patched up real good. Meara didn't attempt to resist arrest."
No motive has been established for the shooting, but Meara was believed to have been distressed over the Clearwater Trench Spillway project, which involves an area surrounding his farm.
The accused man was reportedly given a severe beating by inmates in the Clearwater County Jail when it was learned that he had shot Dr. Royal. A nurse, Earline Chambers, said that Meara was probably suffering from pneumonia at the time the beating occurred, and was probably ill when the shooting was committed.
Later that evening, when Ray woke up to receive medication, he had weird, remarkably clear memories of a conversation between Sharon and himself. He couldn't be sure if it was real or imagined.
“Don't be so violent in your reactions, Ray,” he could have sworn she'd said, trying to teach him. “You're not a stupid man so why react so narrowly to things? It only limits your perspectives and trashes your values in the process.” He knew he could never have made up such an elegantly turned phrase. “Life is worthless without decent values. Forget the macho rhetoric a second. Think! We live in a world of constant fighting: Muslim against Jew, Catholic against Protestant, Christian versus Christian, and so on. If we don't learn to live together we're going to kill off the human race, you know?"
“I don't agree,” he'd said, in a bullheaded mood. “Sometimes hard-core payback is the only answer. Look at your Israelis, you call them nonviolent? And I say good for them."
“Forget the vengeful stuff, Ray. The only steps that have advanced mankind in the last century were those taken by nonviolent leaders such as Gandhi and the civil rights leaders. No exceptions. The ancient moral values are the only ones that make sense: nonviolence, strong personal ethics, truth, and keeping to one's principles."
He'd sure learned that lesson well. Still, sick and hurting as he was, he realized how much he'd learned from Sharon in a short time. She'd already managed to sensitize him to deeply felt, subtle things he'd never bothered to consider before.
Meara closed his eyes and tried to visualize her there in the small cell with him: five feet, six inches of lovely woman. Dark-hued, velvety smooth skin, pale gem-green eyes, and the most provocative mouth of any woman he'd ever known.
The back page of the local newspaper stared up at him when he opened his eyes. He forced himself to pick up the paper and scan the horoscopes. There it was:
“SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 22) This is an ideal time to redecorate your surroundings. Emphasis is on authority figures. But resist the temptation to run away."
65
Sharon is walking across his front lawn. Not in high heels but sandals. Bare, tanned legs, long and sleekly muscled and inviting, walking with the insinuating hip-swinging stride that is the patented walk of sexy young women the world over. Still sophisticated looking but in a thin, flowered summer dress, and sandals. Pretty as a picture.
Her arms are bare and she has rather slender arms, and this, too, is very sexy. He remembers other girls, some of whom had large breasts and relatively small arms. Inside his head he sees the medal of a proficient marksman and the line “expert in small arms."
Sharon's hair is long, loose, a spill of sensuousness, a cascade of silky femininity that flows onto her shoulder. He might ask her to let her hair grow and to wear it hanging to her waist, like his grandmother had, and he would help her give it a hundred strokes every night.
He feels his hands on her shoulders as he comes up behind her. Sees her turn and smile into his face, her eyes wide and the color of perfect emeralds. Eyes of desire.
Did he ever know a girl like her, a mere child of the farm community, perhaps, struggling to pull her child's grass sack through the rows of cotton? Did such a beauty learn beside him, as the smaller boys and girls were taught the rigors of front and back chopping and blocking the plants? Not here.
He had never known a Sharon. Never fumbled with one in the back seat of a car. Never walked one home from school. He had no memories of anyone remotely like her, a mystical, perfect, idealized dream girl who had blown in—and out—of his life.
There was scarcely enough of Sharon inside his head to construct a decent mental picture. The best he could do was a kind of half dream, part reality and part imagination, woven from the crude threads of a jailhouse fantasy.
66
The Swift Trench
A faint chill mist has descended over the party of men, tiny droplets of moisture touching skin, hair, fabric, plastics, beading on the oiled metal surfaces, feeding foliage, dropping into the floodwater beneath the boats. Skinheads, most of them.
Two boats. The one in front a sleek fiber-glass V, and the man in the prow signals. A chopping motion with the hand. The one seated behind him turns and blinks his flashlight once, a long, bright flash at the larger boat behind them. Five men. Equipment.
Both engines stop in a dying purr. Jesus SanDiego, in the prow of the V, absorbs the noises into the pores of his skin. Offended by their pathetic performance. What a joke, these loud, incompetent assholes are. He shrugs it off. No problem. He hears fifty sounds in the unquiet silence.
They are floating in the mouth of the Swift Trench, a black and oily pipeline full of goosenecks and elbow joints that curves up from New Madrid past the Clearwater Trench, forking out toward Barne's Ridge and St. James's Bayou. They're maybe a couple of miles from their destination if they were going in on a straight shot. They're not. They are snaking in from the southwest, out of the cover of a long, thick treeline that runs from the set-back levee clean to the trench itself.
The boats have come upstream from Clearwater, staying west of the levees, running as silently as they could. No lights. One long blink for stop. Noise for go. The V is packed and muffled down. The thirty-footer has a relatively quiet 120-horse on her.
Sandy sniffs the wet night air, wormy and rank, listening to a truck or car rattling across the Kielheimer Bridge, moving up over the levee. He turns, nods, and the kid behind him throttles forward, and the low, throaty 120 rumbles like the glass-packs in his uncle's antique Fairlane, as it coughs into the black wake of churning water they leave behind.
It goes back to way before Farmington, this thing that made Sandy bad. The drugs that burnt him out were what the doctors blamed everything on, but truth be told they only heightened what was already there, twisted and dark, inside a man whose only secret wish had been a hard, unswervingly pernicious death dream. When a man can kill and get away with it—hell, be praised for it—well, then, chief, why not do it? It feels so good and you know what they say ... nobody stops. The people he works for treasure him for what he is.
The man in the prow of the V feels the chill spit hit him lightly in the face like a wet kiss, and his mind wanders back into a fantasy about guns.
/> Sandy loves guns. Somewhere under all this water old shooter Ray has got him a case or two of Alpha Kilos: sweet, neat, wiped, and piped. Custom suppressors. Assault rifles that have been combat proven in every conceivable terrain. Bitchin’ fine cap-crackers that SanDiego can almost taste, hot and sweet like physical desire. Free for the taking. Ray sure can't use them.
Old Ray will have them beautifully turned, fitted to a fine hello, packed like the Hope diamond, and hidden someplace real dumb. Mad Man Meara, a thousand times crazier than SanDiego, so fucking stupid in an age when even the most inexperienced gunrunner knows you use Ma Bell's landlines, only Ray still makes home deliveries! Begs to be taken off. Aches to be ripped.
Jesus is powerfully built, black silk bandanna over skinhead top and whitewalls, rat down the back, black and silver-flecked muscle shirt, red rag armband with his animal count, bat-belt, chute pants, 14E felony flyers, loyalties tattooed on his biceps, emotions on his knuckles. Thickly muscled arms cradling a Ray Meara speciall, as he prays for a night game.
They reach the willows and he fast-forwards his fantasy to the moment where he asks Ray where the guns are hidden. Meara starts to wise off and he sees himself jamming steel in the asshole's mouth, like a big, hard dick. Meara tastes 3-in-1 oil and his own blood. Sandy busts out a few of his teeth with the gun barrel. Lets him eye the death tube.
