The Fever Kill

by Tom Piccirilli

  Instead, it took ten years.

  When he returned he had an ex-wife who still loved him, an eight-year-old son who hated his guts, a row of medals he wasn't allowed to show anybody, a drug czar named Tucco on his tail, and Crease had left Tucco's mistress pregnant.

  He was still trying to figure out how it had all happened and what it all meant.

  Now he was strong and knew how to use a gun, but he hadn't gotten a hell of a lot smarter during his time away. He was a bent cop, like his father. The difference was, Crease was allowed to be. He didn't even have to resist the temptations of life. The narc squad paid him to join the underworld and let his darker self cut free. The worse he acted the better he did his job. What more could you ask.

  In the cherry '69 Mustang that he'd rebuilt himself, ninety miles over the Massachusetts-Vermont border, fifteen outside of Hangtree, with the window open to the rain and the October night air chopping through him like when he was a kid, but sweating like hell, he decided everything would be all right, the fever would get him through.

  Beautiful as she was, with that red, storm-blown hair dripping across her throat, fiery eyes full of anger and faint dignity, Crease didn't really notice her until he saw the blood.

  She moved to the ladies' room as he hung back in the corner of the dark hall at the back of the diner, talking on the pay phone trying to get Mimi to calm down. The woman opened the bathroom door by pressing her shoulder to it and letting out a small gasp of pain as she slid inside, leaving a small swath of red against the scarred wood.

  Mimi's kids shrieked in the background so loudly that he had to pull the phone away. She shouted his name repeatedly as if urging him not to forget it. "Crease! Are you still there? Crease!"

  "Yeah," he told her, his gaze still on the shiny slick on the door. It had him curious. He stepped from the alcove to look out into the Truck-Mart Diner and see if there was anything going on. Cops around, a pissed off boyfriend. He saw nothing.

  Mimi must've practiced being shrill. Nobody could get there on their own like this without really working at it. "Crease!"

  "I'm here."

  "You should be, you're the one who called me. What do you want?"

  "I just wanted to know how Joan and Stevie were doing."

  Mimi's breath slowly whistled out her nostrils. "You barely see either of them, you've been gone for months, and now you're phoning me to ask how they're doing? What is it with you?"

  "Nothing."

  "What's going on? You're getting in too deep in this undercover work, aren't you? It's messing with your head."

  He'd always liked Mimi. Unlike Joan, she had a worldly crust and lots of sharp edges. She talked to him with a dark honesty that his wife had always lacked.

  "Stop in and see them. Whatever you're caught up in, I think you need to come home now."

  "I can't. I have to finish something first."

  It took her back. She seemed to think he was talking about suicide. "But . . . but Joan and Stevie need you. They—" Even Mimi couldn't quite work up enough enthusiasm to make a real appeal. If he was on a ledge, he would've gone over by now. "What about your pension? What about your insurance?"

  "Relax, I'll be back in a few days."

  "You're not in the city. Where are you? When are you coming home?"

  "Whenever I put an end to this thing."

  "Which thing? What thing? You want to come out with it, I can hear it in your voice. But then you put up the wall. If you want to tell me, just say it. Are you drinking?"

  "I'm drinking coffee, Mimi. I'll be fine. And why aren't your kids asleep yet? Go put them to bed."

  "I'm going to take advice on parenting from you?"

  "You should take it from somebody. Tell Joan I'm all right. And tell Stevie I love him."

  "Like he'll believe me."

  Crease started to hang up but the phone shook in his hand with the force of Mimi's voice, fighting him. She'd been married to a longshoreman named Lenny until five years ago when Lenny decided to throw himself in the East River one Fourth of July. Mimi was already pregnant with Lenny's fourth child by then and Crease, who was only twenty-two at the time but married for three years, a cop for two of them, had somehow allowed himself to be swept along with Joan's plans to take care of Mimi and the children.

  They needed insurance. They needed coverage. He didn't know all their names but he'd legally adopted them. Or some of them. He didn't know you could do it and still wasn't sure it was entirely legal. He hadn't quite believed what was going on around him until the judge repeated Crease's name several times, just like Mimi was still doing at the moment, and asked him a few questions Crease had never answered. He'd blinked a couple times and dumbly nodded, and the next thing he knew he was suddenly the father of three or four kids. Maybe five.

  Now he was twenty-seven and had a thick patch of gray growing right up in front and he couldn't remember what he'd wanted to do with his life before he'd gone undercover. Whatever it had been was now too far away.

  It got confusing. He knew he was a good cop because they kept giving him more and more string, and forgave him for always breaking the rules. The ones they found out he was breaking. The others they didn't ask about. Even under deep cover you weren't supposed to back up the dealer during his raids on the competition, dispose of bodies, and screw the guy's mistress. Probably not, anyway.

  Crease slapped the phone down onto the receiver finally cutting off Mimi's voice. They never did find Lenny's body. Crease was beginning to think that no matter how stupid Lenny had been, he'd been pretty sharp there at the end.

  The woman stumbled out of the ladies' room and almost did a header into the wall. Crease's hands lashed out and caught her easily. She went slack the moment he touched her. He drew her gently into his arms, pulling her into the glow of the dim overhead light. She was completely flaccid but her intense eyes were watching him.

  She had a split lip and the beginnings of a new shiner over an old one. A fresh bruise on her chin and another higher on her jaw line that was partially covered by a halfhearted sweep of flesh-colored powder, as if she'd decided there was no point in trying to cover the marks. Her hair was full of blood. He swept back the damp, waving curls and saw that an earlobe had been torn.

  She said, "Well, you through looking? You can take your hands off now. Or you got something else in mind? That what this is about?" Her lips firmed so much that the cut at the corner of her mouth began to ooze again. "You want to try something?"

  "Would you want me to?" he asked.

  His return had already begun to affect the town, his past moving forward through time to meet him. He could very clearly see the threads of his life drawing together now, the pattern beneath beginning to emerge. There were no coincidences. From here on out, everything that happened would have resonance, like a church bell calling the lost in from the fog.

  Crease said, "Hello, Reb."

  ~*~

  She didn't recognize him, not even after she looked him up and down for a minute. He released his hold but kept a hand softly on her elbow in case she needed to be steadied. "Who are you?"

  "The guy who did this, he still around? Out front maybe?"

  "I asked you a question. Who are you? How do you know my name?"

  He checked her eyes again to make sure they were focused, the pupils not dilated, no potential serious head trauma. She looked all right. He glanced down the hall to see if anybody out in the diner was getting inquisitive, if somebody might be heading back here to check on her. He didn't see anyone.

  A bleeding redhead stumbling through the place at two in the morning. Past the waitress, the fry cook, a few truckers, a couple geezers gumming late night eggs and toast. Nobody even looked up. You'd think somebody might at least angle his neck to see if she'd snuffed it.

  "We knew each other a long time ago," he said.

  He realized she'd never recognize him. It was more than the gray hair and the mileage and the voice. He'd gone very far away from the kid
he was over the last ten years, until even he didn't know who he was anymore.

  "We did?"

  "Is the guy still here?"

  "I don't know," she said. "I think he drove off. What do you care?"

  "Boyfriend?"

  "He thinks so."

  "What do you think?"

  "I think he's the latest mistake in a long line of them."

  He could see she regretted saying it immediately. It was flippant and coy, something a tough chick teenager might say to her sister. Her front teeth eased out over her bottom lip and she started to chew down, but the pain brought her back to herself.

  She started sizing Crease up, giving him another good long once over to see what he was after, and how she might be able to play him. He'd gotten the look plenty of times on the job, from Tucco's ladies, even from Morena.

  Her eye and chin were beginning to swell. He said, "Let's go put some ice on that."

  He helped her walk back to the front of the diner and he put her in a booth. The waitress finally took notice and he told her to bring coffee, ice in a dishtowel, and a menu.

  A pickup in the parking lot flicked its brights on, illuminating the booth in a blinding whitewash. They snapped on and off twice more before the lot went dark again.

  "That your latest mistake?" he asked.

  "Yeah," she said.

  Crease stepped to the door of the diner and stared hard at the guy out there. The rain had stopped but that clean smell was still in the air. He breathed it in and made an effort to peel back the years on the guy to see who was under there that he might know.

  Hanging out of the pickup was Jimmy Devlin, swaying high in the cab and starting to honk his horn now. He was one of the kids from the high school who used to hotrod around and throw beer cans at Crease while he was carrying his father home.

  On the trip back to Vermont, Crease had thought he might have to call the minor hostilities and resentments forward, urge them from the forgotten corners. Instead, he was surprised to find all his adolescent upsets crawling free again on their own.

  Despite all he'd seen on the job—the twenty-floor swan dives, the Colombian neckties, the children murdered by their own parents, the maimed innocent driven mad by rape. The homicides he'd witnessed, the bad guys he'd capped, the junkies he'd cleaned out of the river, the ocean of blood and tears, and still the petty shit from his childhood got him going.

  There just had to be something wrong with him.

  He still remembered how Jimmy Devlin laughed. The way he'd chirp his wheels, and kick it into fourth gear from a neutral drop so he could burn rubber down main street, the smoke drifting across Crease's face. Cars flashed through his mind until he came to Jimmy's: an orange '84 Camaro with a Cat-back exhaust system. Seated four but he'd pack his buddies in back there, the girls hanging out the windows sometimes hooting, sometimes just watching. Jimmy would occasionally lob a beer bottle high in the air and it would smash ten feet in front of Crease, exploding like a shotgun blast. The noise would rouse his father enough for him to say, in his whiskey-soaked voice, "Take cover."

  Crease walked back to the table and told Reb, "Finish your meal."

  "He's got a knife. He likes knives."

  Crease thought of Tucco and his butterfly blade. "Everybody does."

  ~*~

  Jimmy was going to fat. All the beer had caught up with him, and his belly hung over his belt, arms thick and tattooed and sunburned. His hair was thinning, the crow's feet really digging into the corner of his eyes. His knuckles were wide and pink. He hadn't even wiped Reb's blood off his hands.

  Crease wondered how Jimmy might stack up in New York. With that swagger, the pissant rage in his eyes, the curled lip. If he walked down 112th Street throwing off sparks of attitude, some high school kid might come along and jack him with a tire iron just on general principle.

  He lit a cigarette and walked past Jimmy Devlin on an angle as if he was making for the 'Stang. As their paths were about to cross, Crease turned abruptly, coming up fast, and got in close. "Hello, Jimmy."

  That put a slash of a sneer across Jimmy's face. "Who the hell are you?"

  You could spend your life trying to answer a question like that, asked by the people who'd spent years making you who you were. Who you'd been.

  Crease said, "I'm not sure if I should believe Rebecca, so I need to ask . . . did you really slap her around?"

  Jimmy liked to call his shots before he made them. He unzipped his jacket and tugged the right side back, exposing the sheathed Bowie knife attached to his belt. Crease was pretty sure that kind of presentation wouldn't hold much sway, even in Hangtree. Maybe it scared the girls.

  The sneer got sharper. "Yeah, I did. You want to know why?"

  "Sure."

  Jimmy Devlin was a talker, he liked to tell people his whole life story. Crease had met a lot of guys like him. In fact, he thought he might be one himself. "She asked if I would help her out with her bills, which I did. Gave her four hundred bucks. Not a king's treasure, but it hurt a little.

  "She promised to pay me back, but I didn't care if she did. Two weeks later, she comes by my place, kicks back on my couch, gets cozy, we start getting into it. Tells me I smell and need to take a shower first. Well, all right. Except she doesn't want to come in with me. Fine. I go shave and soap up and come out to find she's taken two full bottles of Jack and stolen a hundred and eighty bucks out of my wallet. Didn't see her for another four days. Tonight she calls and says she's scared, she's stuck in a motel with a guy she doesn't remember. I go over there, get her, figure she needs some food and coffee. I stop for gas across the street and you know what she does? She runs inside and tells the kid behind the counter I need help with the pumps, something's wrong and gas is leaking. Kid comes out and she steals the plastic jug up front for the retarded kids, or maybe it was for spaying dogs. Whatever. She takes it and tries to hitch a ride with a trucker. He turns her down and she's standing there in the parking lot, holding the plastic jug. I had to talk fast to keep the kid from calling the cops, he thought I was in on it with her. I had to slug her to make her let go of the jug. There was maybe twelve dollars in it, mostly pennies. For that I'm gonna go to the pen?"

  Crease stood there nodding, puffing on his cigarette. He very much wanted to beat the hell out of this guy, but the story sounded true, and the warmth he'd felt for Reb started to cool and his thoughts began to harden again. He didn't know what he owed her for saving his father's badge. He wasn't even sure it was she who'd done it.

  He stared at Jimmy and remembered the crushed beer cans slapping him in the chest, the taste of it as the foam hit him in his face. The stink of the Cat-back exhaust as the engine revved and the girls in the back seat laughed. The bottles exploding. The old man lying on his back saying, Take cover.

  Abruptly, Crease felt tired and the refined rage slackened at the back of his mind. He looked back to the diner to see Reb in the window, watching him. He wondered what it was that drove her to do such stupid things, one after the other, for no real profit. He figured the two of them could probably have a long talk about a lot of similar feelings.

  "Okay," Crease said. "Call it a night, let it go for now."

  "You act like we know each other, but I don't think we do. Who are you?"

  "If I told you, you wouldn't believe me."

  "Tell me anyway."

  "No." The heat rose in his chest. "Now get going. Or do you have a problem with that?"

  Jimmy's eyes flicked to the window and narrowed. He turned back to Crease and said, "Maybe I do."

  Crease knew exactly what had happened. Reb had made another stupid bad mistake and thrown in with Jimmy again. She'd given him some kind of signal that he should take Crease out. Even if Jimmy did act out a little and punch her around some, he was knotted around her pinky. He always would be. She'd decided to deal with the devil she knew rather than take a chance that Crease might somehow be worse.

  Crease said, "Hasn't she played you enough tonight? Do
n't be an idiot."

  The diner door opened and he heard Reb's footsteps behind him.

  Jimmy went for the knife. Maybe just to act tough, distract Crease, or maybe he wanted to see more blood. You couldn't always tell. You couldn't always read the truth in everybody's eyes. Some guys, like Tucco, and like the police commissioner too, said they could. They'd be there staring deep into your face, telling you they could see all of your secrets even while you told lie after lie until your mouth was dry.

  So Jimmy was going for his knife. Still.

  Reb's footsteps stopped on the walk behind him, and he sensed she was deciding which way to go, how to make it out of here. He could feel her fear as naturally as he might feel his own, even though he wasn't afraid of anything. He heard her hair wafting in the wind, the blood, knotted clump of curls tapping against the side of her face.

  There was Jimmy, still reaching.

  Maybe Crease had just become jaded after seeing Tucco snatch out his butterfly blade and strike like a snake with it, going for the eyes and the neck and the temple. One jab, that's all he ever needed. Twisting the blade a little to make sure the damage was done, then yanking it back out, snapping the knife shut and replacing it in his pocket so quickly he never got a drop of blood on himself.

  Finally, Jimmy was almost finished pulling the Bowie, coming up with it. More of a defensive posture than a killing stance. He really didn't want to hurt anybody. It was all show. Another stupid move. You don't pull a deadly weapon without meaning to use it.

  Crease stepped forward and chopped the side of his hand down hard on Jimmy's wrist. The knife dropped and Crease caught it by the handle before it had fallen three inches. He decided to keep it.

  His free hand flashed out and yanked the sheath off Jimmy's belt and put it on his own. He stuck the Bowie in its sheath while Jimmy stared at him in terror.

  "Go away now," Crease said.

  But Jimmy—like Reb, like Crease's father, maybe like Crease himself—could only compound the problem by making yet another bad move. The stupidity latched on and drove you further and further into hell. You hit the gas instead of the brake. You reloaded instead of putting your hands up.