A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller)

by Van Rooy, Michael

  I was weak as the blood surged back into me. I played up on the weakness but he had the gun pointed at Claire’s lower legs.

  So I had my shot but I passed on it and then I was in the air, dangling too.

  Claire finally got some words out. “No tears to see me?”

  “De-hy-d-rat-ed.”

  “We can’t have that!” The Shy Man brought his water bottle and squired it into my mouth and I barely managed to avoid swallowing the razor. When the water was in me I smiled at Claire. “You look great.”

  The razor made my voice sound strange but the Shy Man didn’t notice.

  Claire answered, “And you look like shit.” She turned to the Shy Man. “I’m here for our date. You can let him go.”

  “No.” Neither Claire nor I acted surprised as the Shy Man turned to me. Neither of us had expected him to keep his promise. “I’m going to beat you to death and make your wife watch. Then we can be together WITHOUT distractions.”

  He ended in a scream and his eyes were alight with some strong emotion. He holstered his pistol and removed a lumpy pair of black leather gloves from a jacket pocket.

  “I bought these from a police supply house. Sap gloves with powdered lead sewn into the knuckles and palm. I want you to feel this.” Then he was screaming again. “I want you to FEEL everything!”

  I didn’t feel it but I faked calm. “Ah, you’ve got it wrong.”

  He paused in pulling on his gloves and looked confused. “I do?”

  “Yeah. You keep acting like I’m the dangerous one. I’m not, she is.”

  I pointed, hard to do with your hands cuffed above your head but not impossible, and he turned to look at Claire.

  I grabbed my right hand with my left and squeezed as hard as I could. The pain was staggering, but compared to the beating and the cutting and the fear it was nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Sometimes an animal in a trap will gnaw its own leg off and ambush the trapper when they return.

  Or so I’ve heard.

  And Vikings in the good old days would sometimes cut off their own hands to make the Fountain of Tyr, a gush of blood to blind their enemies in a fight.

  Or so I’ve been told.

  Compared to that breaking some second-rate bones in a hand is a fucking joke.

  I squeezed some more and for a second nothing happened, then the metacarpal bones in the lower thumb and pinkie broke loudly and my hand compressed and slid. I pulled it through the manacles and I was free.

  The Shy Man heard the bones break and was turning back quickly, pulling the pistol from the holster on his hip. He moved just in time to catch the razor I spat at him. I missed though and it only gouged a little chunk out of his cheek, under his eye.

  I had wanted to hit him square in his left eye and pop that little sack of aqueous humour.

  Oh well, the distraction helped, as he flinched.

  Then I was in close and my right elbow caught him in the hollow of his throat as my left hand covered his gun.

  Nothing on me worked right. My body felt far away from me and I was as weak as a kitten. But sometimes that doesn’t matter.

  The elbow might have killed him. I felt his thyroid crush in his throat and I knew he’d start to suffocate right away.

  But it would take time. Three minutes, probably longer, and one can do a lot of damage in three minutes.

  I drew the gun towards me and twisted, getting my palm around the round wooden butt. It was heavier than I imagined, almost three pounds, and I let the weight bring the barrel down until it touched the Shy Man’s thigh. By then I had control of the trigger and squeezed it briskly.

  BOOM!

  The lead .35 calibre round burned down the eight-inch barrel and went right through the Shy Man’s calf and then burrowed through his leg and exited through the base of his foot.

  He was silent and struggling fiercely but the shot made him lurch away from me and spin towards Claire. As he came around she rested her weight on the manacles above her head and raised her legs, showing a flash of skin and an absence of underwear. The Shy Man paused, transfixed despite himself.

  “Get OVER yourself!” Claire yelled, driving her high-heeled feet into his face, and he went down, pulling her right shoe off entirely.

  I took the gun from his hand before the Shy Man even touched the floor and got ready to fire a second shot but I didn’t have to. The right shoe was stuck to his face, the three-inch heel driven right through his eye and lodged somewhere in his brain. He twitched for a long time and finally he stopped doing even that, which gave me a chance to find the keys in his pocket with numb fingers and unlock Claire and then myself.

  We held each other for a long time in silence, her in her silk dress and me naked.

  #51

  What are you doing?”

  I had pulled on a pair of cloth gloves and had dragged the Shy Man into the centre of the warehouse and put him on top of a bale of very dry elk and bison hides. Claire watched me curiously, then climbed down the ladder.

  “Dealing with the evidence.” I dragged the cop over beside the Shy Man and then rolled the cop on top of his body. It didn’t look right, so I drew the cop’s pistol, put it in his right hand and fastened his fingers around it.

  “Why?”

  I nodded at the corpse. “I don’t want to think about him ever again. If the cops come they’ll search the place, gather evidence, and try to pin crimes on him. There will be newspaper stories. There will be movies and books and graphic novels and essays. He will become a martyr. A hero to freaks and a person of importance to the unhealthily curious.”

  Claire sat down at the bottom of the ladder. “I see.”

  “Yeah. People believe Hannibal Lecter is real—a princely ghoul. They root for Norman Bates and admire his mother love. They think Jack the Ripper was misunderstood and try to scry truth in the entrails of his slaughter.”

  My wife was getting into the idea. “That’s normal though, they’re trying to make sense out of insanity. They’re trying to integrate monsters and the things they don’t understand.”

  “I love the way you talk! People blur the lines between fiction and fact. They buy John Wayne Gacy’s paintings, Ted Bundy got married in prison, and you can buy serial killer autographs, collect trading cards and buy bestselling books about their exploits. People don’t try to understand the monsters, they attempt to martyr them. I don’t think the Shy Man here deserves our understanding and I know he doesn’t deserve to be a martyr.” My mouth turned into a rictus. “I think the Shy Man should vanish.”

  Claire thought about it. “So … he just stops?”

  It sounded like she was going to go along with it. “Yes. It’s not very romantic or satisfying but this is real life. And that is not very romantic or satisfying but at least it’s real.”

  “But I want revenge.”

  I stared at the corpse. “Vanishing his ass is the best revenge.”

  Claire kissed me and pulled on another pair of gloves and we spent five-and-a-half hours cleaning the place. First she bandaged me from top to bottom with the contents of a big first-aid kit we found in the Shy Man’s station wagon. Then we wiped every place we might have touched with our bare skin and we gathered every note and scrap of paper we could find and filled a double-lined garbage bag with notebooks and albums. We found a little room off his bedroom where he kept trophies by tracing the sound of a hidden fridge inside a false wall. He kept mementoes—for lack of a better word—in plastic ziplock bags and glass canning jars filled with alcohol.

  I sent Claire away while I flushed all that.

  In reality the whole place was disturbing.

  A fairly small warehouse in the middle of the city. Innocuous. With underground parking and lots of storage space.

  We were stunned by the greenhouse we found, built from factory-ordered kits and sitting in the middle of the main floor storage area. The space was full of trestle tables growing roses and twenty different varieties of flowers.<
br />
  I ushered Claire out when I saw the white of bone poking through the loam.

  In the Shy Man’s bedroom I found a folding stocked Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic assault rifle with a 75-round snail drum magazine by his bed right beside a four-litre container of non-petroleum lubricant from Costco. Under his pillow were a folding saw and a dried human ear.

  In a giant cedar trunk at the foot of the bed I found clothes all neatly dry cleaned, pressed and put away. All for a man and a woman much larger than the Shy Man. I threw them onto the floor and found a black and white wedding picture of an ugly man with a huge moustache wearing a uniform coat and a kilt and, beside him, in a flowing dress, an equally ugly woman.

  I looked at them and saw, somewhere between them, the genesis of the Shy Man.

  None of his clothes fit me so I rummaged until I found the kilt, a huge, heavy wool monstrosity and a white dress shirt that fit me like a tent but at least covered the bruises and cuts and some of the bandages.

  In his main fridge we found jars of a yellow liquid I didn’t think about.

  By a La-Z-Boy recliner in his living room we found a swear jar made from an old kerosene tin. It was full of old, tarnished quarters, the kind that still had silver in them.

  In the kitchen I found a drawer full of loose cash and change, which I pocketed. I left behind a Luger 9mm pistol with no bullets in the magazine and a First World War trench knife with triangular blade and knuckle-duster hilt.

  In a small dressing room I found a velvet-lined bedside drawer with sixty-two pieces of Ms. Paris’s jewellery neatly arrayed. I filled another garbage bag with that and added it to the pile.

  By the time it was way past dark I still wasn’t sure we had gotten everything but I couldn’t stand the place anymore, neither could Claire.

  I put a chair in the middle of the room and went back to the bodies. There I pulled on five torn garbage bags (the best I could do for a Hazmat suit) and I picked up the Shy Man, who was stiff as a board. I pressed the LeMat into his right hand and got behind his body while pressing the barrel into a hole in the back of the head of the dead cop, who had started to go soft again in his chair. Then I squeezed the trigger.

  The low velocity round took his head apart all the way.

  I carried another chair from the kitchen into the room and put it beside the dead cop. Then I propped the Shy Man’s body into it. I’d found a strange-looking reading lamp with parrot designs in his bedroom and I put that between the chairs and used the Shy Man’s fingers to handle it. Then I snaked an extension cord from a kitchen outlet to the light and ran it through his dead fingers again.

  When I was sure it would work I plugged the outlet into a digital timer set for 4:00 a.m. and plugged in the whole contraption. I chipped a small hole in the light bulb itself and made sure it hung down into a crystal goblet I filled with gasoline. The gasoline filled the bulb almost to the top where the filament was.

  The idea was that the timer would count down and turn on the light bulb. Then the heat and spark of the light itself would ignite the gasoline—at about 495 degrees Fahrenheit. Surrounding the light I piled balled-up newspapers, torn books, broken furniture, cans of paint and formaldehyde, all liberally splashed with gasoline and kerosene I’d found stored near the station wagon.

  The lamp would ignite the newspaper and other things and the fire would spread through the wooden building full of dried and splintered wood covered in one hundred years’ worth of paint. And the tinder dry furs and hides would catch as well and the fire would burn hot and fast.

  Or that was the hope.

  I settled the Shy Man’s corpse against the chair. With his fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun I pushed the barrel into his left eye, following the hole left by Claire’s high heel as much as possible, and pulled the trigger.

  His head exploded as well and the body flopped out of the chair and onto the floor like a billet of wet wood. The gun flipped away with the recoil and ended up far away.

  I stripped the garbage bags off and bundled them for dumping outside.

  On our way out of the building I locked the door from the outside and flicked the key under the crack at the bottom in the general direction of the corpse.

  Six blocks away I stuffed the garbage bag into an industrial skiff outside a roller rink that was being demolished. Two blocks past that I got rid of the bundle of garbage bags that had made up my hazardous material suit. A block later I dumped the jewellery into a grease trap behind a dim sum restaurant.

  It sank into the foulness and vanished.

  After that we just kept walking, putting distance between us and the dead man and the filth of his dreams and desires.

  #52

  Claire and I didn’t say a word to each other until we reached a Salisbury House restaurant perched improbably in the middle of the bridge over the Red River.

  Before we went in I asked her, “How do I look?”

  She looked me over critically. “Like an idiot.” I was barefoot in a hundred-year-old white linen shirt and heavy wool kilt with a sporran full of loose change and cash from a dead psychopath.

  Claire went on, “But your injuries are covered. Except on your face.”

  So we went into the restaurant and there we smiled like idiots and acted like young lovers. We cleaned up in the bathrooms and I ordered three breakfasts—fried, poached and scrambled eggs, sausage, ham and back bacon, rye, white and more rye toast. And coffee. And orange juice.

  Claire was aghast. “How can you eat?”

  “Easily. We’re alive and he’s dead.”

  She stared at me hard and opened and closed her mouth several times as I continued.

  “Smile, honey. We’re young lovers. Young lovers need to keep up their strength. This is the only reason we’re out and about in the city at this unholy hour. Everyone will see us and place us in the proper, slightly naughty category and forget us. If you smile.”

  We were in a booth in the back and it was 2 a.m., but there were still thirteen people in the place, most nursing coffee and avoiding hangovers. A pretty girl with buck teeth two booths away was eating a nip, a Salisbury hamburger, with grim determination.

  Claire finally smiled and I went on, low voiced, “I’m starving. You should eat too.”

  “I may never eat again.”

  “He got what he deserved.”

  She sipped some coffee and made a face. “Did those women? Did the husband? Did the son?”

  “No.” I thought about the dead and shook my head. “No. I cannot bring them back. I can just try to make sure they’re not remembered in conjunction with him. We, you and I, can do that.”

  She shook her head and, behind her, the girl with the nip lost the battle and booked it for the bathroom with her jaw set as rigid as iron.

  “I can go back,” I offered, “I can stop everything before it starts and I can clean up the scene I staged. The cops will give me a pass, if they find out. Because they used you as a Judas goat. I can rearrange things so that the cops have a fucking road map. I can place all the blame on him. I can even make you and me heroes.”

  “Can you?”

  “Sure. And I would do it right now if it was a question of public fear … if everyone still thought there was a monster out there killing for fun. But the cops never told anyone about the Shy Man so there is no fear. No one is worried. And if I don’t say anything then the only ones who will continue to be worried will be the cops. And I’m okay with that.”

  I smiled widely like I imagined a wolf would, if a wolf could.

  “And maybe the cops being worried is even a good thing.”

  “How so?”

  “Maybe it’ll keep them on their toes, I don’t know. In any case my sympathy for them is limited.”

  She shivered and ordered poached and bacon and rye toast.

  Eventually the girl who’d lost the battle with the nip came back and finished it.

  I had to admire her determination.

  At twenty to fo
ur we left the restaurant and walked to a parking garage beside the Richardson building and climbed the stairs to the top. There we watched and, at a little after four, the sky to the north turned crimson and the sound of sirens filled the air.

  “Will there be anything left?”

  More sirens joined the chorus and lights approached the fire from all directions, dozens of trucks seemingly.

  I squeezed Claire’s hand. “It is a 130-year-old building, according to a plaque in the kitchen. Splintery wood dried out by 130 prairie winters, coats of paint upon coats of paint, stored furs and hides all dried out and preserved with buckets of chemicals. And closets of methyl alcohol and dry cleaning chemicals.” I shook my head and put my arm around her. “It’ll burn like the fires of hell.”

  “Good.”

  The Shy Man’s money bought us a room in the Fairmont Hotel after Claire’s credit card was shown to prove we didn’t need to spend the cash we spent. For $269 plus tax we got a king-sized bed in a 300-square-foot room. It had air conditioning, a window that opened onto the burning building a few blocks away, an alarm clock, bathrobes, cable television, a coffee maker, desk, hair dryer, high-speed Internet, mini-bar and telephone. A fifty-dollar tip to the Filipino bellboy got me a bottle of Southern Comfort liqueur that I put in front of Claire once we’d dragged the desk over so we could see the fire outside.

  We had a great view.

  She drank most of the bottle and, when she passed out, I put her in bed and waited.

  When she woke up she watched me sleep the clock around.

  The next day we went home.

  #53

  The election was scheduled to take place two months after Claire and I got loose.

  At first the press wanted nothing but a piece of me, but watching McDonald and Illyanovitch dance kept them busy as shit. McDonald especially loved being a popular figure and played up his actor-school oratory until he almost made sense. Meanwhile Illyanovitch tried to convince everyone he was as honest as the day was long—he may even have been for all I know.