“Well, that’s why I was taken aback,” Bob replied. “We never went into specifics, but I had the impression that Ruzak was straight but kind of a sad sack when it came to the ladies.”
“Sad sack?” I asked. I looked at Felicia. She looked down at her plate.
“Well, look at him,” Farrell said. I didn’t understand why he was directing his anger at Bob’s mistake at me.
“I know we don’t want to talk shop,” I said. “But the Jefferson Davis thing reminded me of the button question.”
The three of them stared at me as if I had lost my mind.
“You know, the hypothetical button that you press to wipe someone off the face of the earth. Would you press it?”
“You bet your wide homosexual ass I would,” Farrell growled.
“So the idea is, you have this magic button that you hit…” Bob began.
“Right. Or like Hitler. If you could build a time machine and go back to 1935. Waste him. Would you?”
“In a heartbeat,” Bob said. “How many people died in the war? Ten million? Twenty? I’d take that deal any day.”
“An element of that is you know what happens if you don’t,” I said. “We don’t know for certain what Quinton might do. Maybe he’ll get his life on track or time will do it for him. Most psychopaths, if they live that long, mellow out by middle age.”
“Can there be such a thing as a mellow psychopath?” Felicia asked.
“My point is, doesn’t basic human goodness, not to mention five hundred years of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, counsel against a preventative, preemptive punishment? Just because all the shrinks agree that someone like Quinton Stiles will offend again and probably violently, does that mean we have the right to exact vengeance, particularly when we’d be avenging something that hasn’t happened yet? What gives us the right to play God?”
“You’re right,” Bob said to Felicia. “He’s quite the armchair philosopher.”
“He’s quite the idiot is what he is,” Farrell said. A vein was pulsing in his neck. He looked ready to blow a gasket. “He’s got it backward. It ain’t about punishing him. It’s about saving her. It’s not about the past. It’s about the future.”
“I’m not sure the Hitler parallel works anyway,” I went on. “It’s more like Yellowstone. Yellowstone is one gigantic caldera, a coneless volcano. It blows every six hundred thousand years or so. There’s no question it’s going to blow again; we know that and we know it’s due. We just don’t know the exact day. It may be tomorrow. It may be next week. It may be next year or in another hundred years. But it is going to pop, and when it does, half of the western United States is going to disappear.”
“That doesn’t quite work, either,” Bob said. “There’s nothing we can do about Yellowstone except prepare for the aftermath. A human being can be ‘shut down.’ A volcano can’t.”
Felicia was smiling. “I knew you two would hit it off.”
Bob served a sparkling wine with dessert, apple pie with caramel-drizzled vanilla ice cream. Farrell stuck with the Jack Daniel’s. He became sullen and monosyllabic. Bob and I got involved in a discussion about who really started the Civil War. Was it all a dastardly plan of Lincoln’s to maneuver the Confederates into firing the first shot? Felicia watched the debate while resting her chin on her fist, and her eyes seem to glow like a cat’s in the candlelight. I had never seen her face in candlelight. She was lovely as an Impressionist painting, the flowery pattern on her dress reminding me more than anything of a Monet landscape, drenched in light. There was an aching high in my chest and the familiar sensation of the room constricting around me, but I chalked it up to the food and the alcohol and not the nearly unbearable loveliness of the golden light in her hair or the graceful sweep of her neck or the elegance of her bare arms. Major Anderson put on a brave front and fought back, but he and his men were doomed at the firing of the very first shot. There was no way they could have outlasted the bombardment and no way they could have saved the fort. Surrender was inevitable. The fort would fall, but he and his men would go down with their honor intact.
11:24 p.m.
I dropped Farrell off at his place. He still seemed a little miffed at me. I pointed out that the conception of Bob’s misconception began with his remark about being my date; it wasn’t my fault. He told me he wasn’t mad about that. I asked what he was mad about and he said he wasn’t mad about anything.
“It’s okay, you know,” he said. “If you are.”
“If I’m what?”
“You know. It’s okay with me.”
“Good. What’s okay?”
“I never knew you to have one.”
“Have one what?”
“You know.”
“I know what?”
“It makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
He wouldn’t look at me. “The thing is, Ruzak, what I said back there about hating … people like you, that wasn’t … I don’t hate them. I just don’t like being around them. Not that I don’t like being around you. I like you, Ruzak. Always have.”
“Farrell, I’m not gay.”
“Didn’t say you were. Did I say you were? I just said it made sense and it’s okay.”
“I was engaged once.”
“So was Elton John.”
“I don’t have to prove anything here.”
“Hell no.”
“In fact, I’d tell you something, a big secret, if I thought I could trust you.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“The whole faux pas of Bob and the gay thing is pretty darned ironic.”
“Because you’re gay?”
“Because I’m not.”
“Oh. Oh! Felicia? Really? Jesus Christ! That’s why you asked me?”
“The biggest reason is, there was no woman to ask.”
“Because the one you would want to was already there. That sucks.”
“It does suck.”
“She know?”
“She’d kill me if she did.”
“Bob, too.”
“I’m not sure. He seems like a nice guy. Sort of my worst fear realized.”
“Because if he was an asshole, you could make a move.”
“That’s what I tell myself. Maybe I’m just looking for excuses not to.”
“You know what I would do if I were you?”
“Write her a heartfelt note?”
“Get laid.”
He got out. I watched him wobble up the walkway to his house, waited until he was safely inside, and then drove home.
I parked in my space in the underground garage. Rode the elevator to the third floor. Got off the elevator, turned the corner, went down the hall. The door to my apartment was ajar. After my one and only contact with Quinton Stiles, I had started carrying my gun everywhere I went. I had never fired it at anything other than a paper target and I wasn’t what you’d call a crack shot, but I felt better having it on me. Now I pulled it out and eased off the safety.
No light shone through the one-inch gap. I pushed the door open slowly with my foot. I didn’t remember doing it, but I must have closed Archie up in his crate before I left; he would have jumped me by now.
I had been running late for the dinner. Had I neglected to close the door all the way? Had he escaped and, if he had, where was he now? Had a neighbor taken him in? Or had someone found him wandering the halls and reported him to Sterchi’s management? That super named Whittaker was itching for an excuse to confiscate my dog.
“Archie?” I called softly into the dark.
With my .44 in my right hand, I reached across my body with my left and hit the light switch. My eyes immediately went to his crate.
The crate was empty. Archie was lying halfway between it and where I stood, his nose pointed toward the door, his eyes staring sightlessly at my shoes. His right forepaw was missing. A chunk of his ear lay six inches from my foot. Lying beside Archie’s open mouth was Lambie. Lambie was no longer white. Lambie was rus
t-colored, the color of Archie’s drying blood. There was more, a lot more, pooled around him. It had spread out to form a perfect half-moon shape. It glistened in the light.
A wiser man would have tamped down his emotions once he recovered from the initial shock. A wiser man would have searched the entire apartment—the bedroom, the bathroom, the closets, under the bed, every single inch—before doing anything else.
I dropped the gun into my jacket pocket and rushed to his side. Knelt in his blood—tacky, but not completely dry; it had not been that long. Pressed my hand gently against his side. His body was warm. But was it warm enough? Held the back of my hand in front of his black nose. I felt no breath. My fingertip touched his tongue. Dry. I bent low to whisper into his mutilated ear. His chocolate brown eye stared sightlessly at my face.
I lifted him from the floor. He felt too heavy. He felt like a deadweight. My foot slipped in his blood and I lurched forward. My thighs slammed into the back of the sofa and I nearly dropped him. A flat-footed shuffle back to the door, and then into the hallway, scrubbing my bloody soles against the carpeting, bypassing the elevators, slamming the stairway door open with my rear end, feeling his blood soaking into my shirtfront as I descend the four flights to the garage. I didn’t want to put him on the ground while I dug out my keys, so I lifted him onto the roof, and in the hot, poorly ventilated air I could smell that distinct coppery odor of blood. He was slick with it, and he slid off the roof as I fumbled in my pocket for the car keys, tumbled down the windshield, leaving a streak of crimson on the glass, landed on the hood with a loud thump as I threw myself toward him with an inarticulate cry of despair, but my reach was half an inch too short. His momentum carried him over the front fender. I heard his body smack against the concrete. I started toward him, turned back, unlocked the car, turned again, stopped, turned back, threw open the back door, and then went to the front of the car, where he lay. The fall had dislodged his intestines; they had slipped through the foot-long gash in his belly. Stooping beside him, I tried to push them back in before scooping up his body from the ground. His head hung limply off my forearm. Not as warm now. Not nearly warm enough. I put him in the backseat, slammed the door shut, jumped behind the wheel. My jacket and shirt were saturated with his blood. It was cold. It plastered my shirt to my chest. I ran the wipers to clean the windshield, but the reservoir of cleaning fluid had run dry and all I accomplished was to create a crimson smear, an opaque screen I could barely see through.
There was an emergency care center two miles from my apartment. Traffic lights, stop signs, speed limits—they didn’t concern me. I hunched over the steering wheel, squinting through the curtain of my dog’s blood. I talked to him the entire seven-minute drive. “Hang in there, Arch. Hang on, almost there.” Screeched to a stop in front of the building on the eighth minute. Went through the doors on the ninth.
He was not dead. The universe would not bear it. His death would cause the entire structure to come crashing down. We were teetering upon the edge of the event horizon, below us the lightless maw, at the center of which the singularity wherein the known laws of all we understand break apart, about which we know absolutely nothing yet toward which we fall, where time and space are torn apart and nothing escapes, not even light.
SATURDAY
12:13 a.m.
Felicia came in wearing a white T-shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, and flip-flops. Her toenails looked freshly painted. She sat down next to me, close enough for me to smell her hair. Felicia smelled like peaches. I smelled like blood.
“Is he still in the OR?” she asked.
“He’s dead,” I replied.
“Oh, Ruzak,” she said. She took my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I asked for his body. They won’t release it to me. See, it’s the same old problem, Felicia: I don’t have a carcass-disposal license. They can hold him till morning or they said they can dispose of him. It’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee.”
“There’s a pet cemetery out in Seymour,” she said. “You want me to check it out?”
“No. Archie didn’t like other dogs. He wouldn’t want to spend eternity next to any. For an additional forty bucks, I can get a tastefully decorated urn to house his remains.”
“You don’t have to decide that now.”
“If I don’t authorize someone to do it, they call the county and the county cremates him. No charge. Only the hidden kind. You know, taxes.”
“Right,” she said. She held on to my hand. “We need to get you home.”
“Why?”
“It’s a crime scene, Ruzak. Have you called the cops?”
“No.”
“Okay. We’ll call them on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“Home, Teddy. Come on.”
She stood up, tugged on my arm.
“I’m not sure I’m okay,” I said.
“Probably not.”
“To drive, I mean.”
“Definitely not. I’ll drive. We’ll come back for your car tomorrow.”
“Should I ask them if that’s okay? I don’t want to get towed.”
“Some crazy just murdered your best friend and you’re worried about your car being towed?”
“I’ll move it to the far end of the lot.”
My car smelled like blood, too. I got out and threw up beside the trunk. Felicia stepped out of her car. There was a gentle breeze coming from the south; it ruffled her hair.
She rolled down the windows and cranked up the AC. The night air was as soft and sweet as a newborn baby’s breath.
“Let me know if you’re going to be sick again.”
“I forgot his ear,” I said. “And his paw. They might have been able to reattach them.”
“Except he’s dead.”
“That’s the point. I didn’t know that at the time and I forgot to grab them.”
She had her cell phone out.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “As dangerous as driving drunk.”
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the address book to Meredith Black’s cell number. My call went to her voice mail.
“I thought she was a homicide detective,” Felicia said after I left a message.
“This is one.”
“Wouldn’t you call it … Hell, what would you call it?”
“Canicide,” I guessed.
She parked in the loading zone in front of the Sterchi. The stars seemed unusually numerous and bright.
On the ride up to the third floor, Felicia said, “Well, we’ve answered the Stiles question anyway.”
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I can handle this.”
“I know I don’t have to stay,” she said crossly.
“So why are you?”
My door was still open. We paused there. Behind me, Felicia gasped.
“That fucking son of a bitch,” she whispered.
1:49 a.m.
Techs snapped pictures, dusted the apartment for fingerprints, dropped Archie’s paw and the piece of his ear into evidence bags. One of them picked up Lambie. It protested with a pitiful little squeak. I asked him if I could have Lambie back when they were done with it. While that was going on, a detective questioned the neighbors who had wandered into the hall and clustered around the door, trying to get a peek at the carnage inside. Her partner questioned me. Did I have any idea who might have done this? I did. Had I noticed any suspicious activity? I hadn’t. Was anything missing from the apartment? I had no clue if anything was missing. The detective asked if I could check. So I left the detective and Felicia sitting on the sofa and went through the place quickly. I didn’t expect to find anything missing, and I didn’t. I returned to the sofa. Felicia took my hand. I asked the detective if they wanted my bloody clothes for DNA testing. He shrugged. Fine. I went into my bedroom, closed the door, stripped out of my clothes, put on a fresh pair of slacks and a shirt, and carried the bloody clothes back to him in a stinking, sticky wad. He summoned one of the techs,
who held open a large paper grocery sack, into which I dropped the bundle. I sat back down, the detective on one side, Felicia on the other. She took my hand. Where was Quinton Stiles now? the detective asked. I didn’t know. One of the techs was on her knees, using a Dustbuster to vacuum the baseboards. I was a little embarrassed. I hadn’t cleaned the baseboards in weeks. Had he made any specific threats? Not that I could remember. Was there anyone else who might want to hurt me? Not to my knowledge, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone.
The uniformed cop on hall duty opened the door and Meredith Black came in. For the first time, I saw her without makeup.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“You called me.”
She motioned for the detective to get up. He did and she sat down beside me. She flashed her canines at Felicia.
“Hi, how are you?”
Felicia gave a noncommittal half smile and looked away.
“Looks like your dog put up one helluva fight,” Meredith said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He wasn’t much of a watchdog.”
“Hey, Ruzak, this is tough, but you should look at it this way: You wanted to find him and now he’s found you. Now it’s our turn.” She turned to the detective. “There’s a girlfriend and a mom.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” I said.
“Maybe,” Meredith said. She turned back to the detective. “Start with Momma. Put a tail on her. Phone records, credit-card statements, the works. Girlfriend’s, too.”
“Tail her, too?” he asked.
“Why not? And if that doesn’t pan out, his best buddy from high school. Work your way back to preschool if you have to. And everyone he’s ever worked with, if the tweak ever held down a job.”
“He was in the army,” I said.
“The army, too,” she said to the detective. “And Frank? Lean. Ruzak is a friend of mine.”
She went to the door. Frank called after her. “How hard?”
“Hard.”
2:27 a.m.
I escorted Felicia downstairs to her car. I looked up and down the street. Was he parked somewhere, watching? She didn’t seem surprised when I got in beside her.
“It was Dayton,” I said. “I crossed a line.”
The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line Page 11
