The Fever Kill

by Tom Piccirilli

  Jimmy Devlin gathered up his remaining anger and lifted one of those large fists and swung it up from his knees. The fist rose and rose, the arm straightening as Jimmy hauled off. His body twisted and he let loose with a grunting war cry like he expected to kill Crease or be murdered in the next ten seconds. He actually closed his eyes and turned his face, afraid to see where the fist might go.

  Crease thought, I'd have to wait here all night long before that punch came anywhere near me.

  He stepped in and still had to wait before Jimmy's wrist came up far enough that Crease could snap his forearm against it. He tapped Jimmy twice in the solar plexus, twice more on the chin, and watched the guy's eyes roll up into his head.

  An icy wind blew dead leaves across Crease's knees, the scent of the past coming on even stronger now. He turned away before Jimmy hit the ground.

  On the walk, Reb stood unsure of what to do, which way to run. The cool acceptance in her expression had almost given over to an animal panic.

  She struggled with it for a second before coming to the realization that Crease wasn't about to beat on her, wasn't even going to make her explain herself.

  He opened the passenger door of the 'Stang and said, "I'll give you a lift home. Or do you want to stay here?"

  She started to relax a little, and the adrenaline buzz she'd been on dissipated. The exhaustion flooded into her face and he had to sling himself forward as she pitched into his arms again.

  He got her into the 'Stang and drove north toward Hangtree. Reb showed him her teeth, said, "Crease, goddamn you, it's been a while," and passed out against the dashboard.

  Chapter Two

  He drove easily through the back roads on the outskirts of town, the intimacy returning to him with the slippage of memories. They came to him sharply and ground inside him like broken glass, a particularly jagged recollection making him frown or tighten his fists on the steering wheel.

  Reb didn't carry a purse, but he figured she still lived in the same house where she'd grown up. Where he used to climb the trellis to her window and ease into darkness, and she'd urge him on with faint murmurs and throaty laughter. With only a sliver of silver moonlight slicing through a broken pane to show him the way. He'd stumbled on the icy shingles once and busted the corner of the window with his knee. From then on, a cracked crescent shadow always hung across his back as he slid into bed with her. Her father would get up in the middle of the night and play videotaped reruns of old baseball games. Reb's fingers would be working through the sweaty folds of Crease's chest hair, and he'd hear the man cursing and thumping the arm of his recliner like he still had a bet on the game.

  There was hardly any growth to Hangtree. He spotted an extra gas station, another street light, and about five acres of new housing development sidling toward the highway. Everything else was pretty much how he remembered it.

  He parked in front of Reb's house, a little stunned to see the place in such sad shape. The rain gutters had collapsed and lay hanging against the sides of the house, swaying slightly in the wind. The porch had severe water damage, stairs and floorboards chipped and buckling. The screen door had busted off its hinges and stood propped under the outside light. Straw spun from disintegrating birds' nests jammed in the high corners of the veranda. The yard was overgrown, heavily choked with weeds and leaves. A maple had fallen and crushed a ten-foot portion of the back fence. It looked like it had happened at least a couple of years ago. He felt a strange tug of sorrow.

  So Reb's parents were dead. Her old man, for all his faults, was always on the ball when it came to home repair and taking care of the place.

  Crease looked over at her snoring thickly through her swollen nose. He knew she lived here alone with the ghosts of her mother and father cloying the rooms, wandering the halls, seated at the kitchen table.

  He glanced up and saw the broken window. The crescent crack had spiderwebbed out to consume the whole pane.

  Sometimes you found the symbols of your life, and sometimes they found you.

  He got her out of the 'Stang and half-carried her to the front door while she murmured plaintive appeals. She muttered questions and answered them herself, crying out, "No way, hell no." He didn't know her body anymore and had trouble relating the plump, curvy teenager with this skinny, hard, lovely woman. Their combined weight bowed the rotted porch. The stink of fetid water rose from beneath the house.

  The front door was open and the minute she got inside she relaxed again and went totally limp. She was easier to handle that way. He lifted her as she slumped into the crook of his arm, and he went through the place turning on light switches, her feet brushing dust from the furniture. On the walls, antique portraits with austere expressions kept an eye on him. The dead were always watching.

  He got her on the couch, searched the bathroom and kitchen and found a dishtowel, ice, coffee, aspirin, bandaging tape, and hydrogen peroxide. Reb's breath whistled through her nose. He checked it and found it wasn't broken. He peered into her mouth to make sure her jaw wasn't dislocated and no teeth were cracked. She'd be all right.

  The sink was stacked with dirty dishes. She didn't have a microwave or a coffee pot so he had to wash out a mug and pour the stale grounds in and fill it with hot water. He got the aspirin down her throat and made her take a few sips of coffee. He pressed the dishtowel full of ice onto her face, cleaned the torn earlobe, and got some tape on it. She could use a stitch but he figured she'd never go to a doctor. He did the best he could.

  He sat beside her and looked at her father's chair. It was about three feet from the television, the arms pounded all out of shape. He wouldn't even have to ask her what happened. He knew the man had died right there, in front of the TV, screaming at the screen.

  Her mother, a petite, weak-willed woman with sagging shoulders, would've died shortly after him. She probably spent his funeral feeling overwhelming relief and hope, thinking there was still time to do something with her life. Crease could just imagine her staring in the mirror, trying to force herself to accept the idea that she was still pretty enough to start again. Young enough. Strong enough. Almost. The world would've loomed large and mysterious for her after so many years in the house, acting out her role in carefully produced movements. The dishes, the dusting, the baking of pies, her existence defined by the concise repetition of endless minutiae. The thrill of freedom would begin to vanish, slowly at first and then more rapidly, as her despair mounted. How do you start? What do you do?

  No wonder Rebecca cut loose like a wildcat. Her parents were gone but she was living in the vault full of their memories. She'd have nowhere else to go but she'd still never want to go home. She'd stay out all night long with anybody, just so long as she could stay away from the place. The sex and stealing and late-night slap-arounds would just make life a bit more fun and bearable.

  He noticed she was awake and watching him. She stirred beside him on the couch and groaned.

  "Are you going to jump me?" she asked.

  "Would you want me to?"

  "You said that before."

  "It's the same answer to the same question."

  She thought about it. "I don't know. I don't think so. Not tonight anyway."

  "Just as well."

  A woman who'd spent years throwing only one thing around didn't like to have it thrown back. A red shadow crossed her face. "What do you mean by that?"

  "It means I don't feel like jumping you, Reb. Not tonight anyway."

  "Why not?"

  "It's been a long day."

  She shook her head at him like he was crazy.

  They all judged you and found you wanting. The pervs and the misfits, the dealers and the addicts. A guy who'd just raped a grandmother would still give you the stink-eye.

  Now here Crease was, with a beaten girl living in a rotted home, and she was staring at him like he was nuts. Where did it come from? This complex they all had, thinking they were better than the next person even when they were down in the sewer. Sometime
s it made him laugh. Sometimes it didn't.

  He lit a cigarette and sat there smoking in silence. It was weird, but he only smoked in front of other people, never when he was alone. What the hell did that say about him? He shifted so the sheathed knife wouldn't dig into his thigh.

  She stared into his face and said, "Why are you back? Why in God's name would anybody come back?"

  "I've got unfinished business."

  "It's been, what, ten years?"

  "Yeah."

  "Any business you can let go for ten years is finished."

  It wasn't true, not quite anyway, but he didn't blame her for thinking so. He'd performed CPR on dying men who lived long enough to confess to sins from forty, fifty years ago. Talking about crimes that were so old they weren't even on the books anymore. Begging forgiveness from their long-dead wives, friends who wouldn't even remember their names. Some of it never got finished.

  "You could've killed him," she said. "Jimmy. The way you took his blade away from him. You handled him like he was nothing."

  He thought she'd ask why he hadn't. Why he hadn't killed a guy he had nothing against anymore except the vestiges of an adolescent venom, as if it was the normal thing to do. You meet a guy in a parking lot and you get a little steamed so you take him out of the game. The modern world was an impatient place. It wanted you to run to extremes.

  But she didn't ask. She stretched her legs out over his lap and he began rubbing her calves, the way he used to do with Joan back when they were first married. She'd coo and moan with pleasure and eventually sit up and slide into his lap and they'd make love. He'd hold her tight like he was sinking into a well while she panted in his ear.

  "You got a wife?" Reb asked.

  "Divorced."

  She nodded, as if it were the only answer she ever heard. "Kids?"

  "Yeah."

  "How many?"

  "I don't know," he told her. "Six or seven, I think."

  She smirked at him. "You a strutting tomcat now? How the hell can you not know how many kids you have?"

  It was another good question. He said, "I legally adopted my sister-in-law's kids. My wife asked me to. It seemed like the right thing to do. I was trying to be everything my father wasn't. I have an eight-year-old son named Stevie. He's very smart and extremely mature. He hates me."

  "Why's that?"

  "I walked out on them, more or less, a few years back."

  "Why?"

  "It was part of the job."

  "Which job?"

  No reason to tell her anything but the truth. "I'm a cop."

  It got her nodding again. "Like your father," she said. "

  "Yes, like my father."

  Thinking that, except for the man's one big mistake, he'd always been pretty clean. The weight of the world had broken him down a piece at a time. Crease's mother's death had been the final crush.

  Crease thought, Me, I get to party and deal drugs and double-tap bastards to the back of the head, and I get paid for it from both sides. I have medals that I can never wear, not that I'd want to.

  "Why did a cop have to walk out on his family?" she asked.

  "I was undercover. I had to build a whole new life."

  "I didn't think they gave cops with families that kind of job."

  "They don't," Crease told her. "I ran into a dealer named Tucco one night in a bar. I made up a name on the spot. We got to be friends. Pretty soon he was inviting me back to his penthouse to meet his posse. Most of them were low-level traffickers, but a couple were the real thing. Guys moving two hundred keys a year. Big scores. Without even trying I was hanging out in his inner circle. The department had been trying to place a man undercover in there for a couple years but Tucco always sniffed them out."

  "So why didn't he sniff you out?"

  "I don't know. Maybe because I was never much interested in busting him. I liked him, we had some good times."

  "How old was your son then?"

  The question took him back. He stopped rubbing her legs and lit another cigarette. "Almost six."

  "You didn't give them up for the job. You liked your new life. The drugs and money and women, right?"

  There was no way to explain it to her. She had small-town reasoning. She thought it was all about cash and getting laid because that's all there was to reach for in a place like Hangtree. She'd never understand what real action was. How your nerve endings were always on fire. How, no matter who you were with, you had to look over your shoulder, had to always be ready for the double-cross, the knife in the neck. Had to stay sharp. Crease never did any drugs and Tucco liked that about him, that he could be just as crazy without getting high as the other guys were when they got wasted. It was all part of being out on the rim. He couldn't trust his captain or the commissioner any more than he could trust Tucco. Maybe less.

  Reb let out a throaty laugh full of base assumptions. "You traded in your old lady and eight or nine kids for the chance to roll around in the big life. To take a pop in the vein, drive the best cars, wear diamond pinky rings. Strippers and whores all the time." She stared through him, not seeing him at all. Seeing somebody else completely. Is that what she thought the long green got you? Pinky rings? "You like the dirty life."

  "Mostly," he admitted. "They're better off without me anyway. Joan needs a different kind of man, someone who can give her a stable life. Someone who comes home at a decent hour, who puts in his time around the house. Makes sure she's not alone too often. I was never very responsible. She's a very good mother, to Stevie and to me too, when you get down to it. She deserves somebody better."

  "You're getting maudlin."

  "Yeah. Being back in Hangtree is doing it to me."

  She groaned as she struggled to sit up. He helped her get to her feet. She took more aspirin and downed the rest of the coffee. "You got any bags? Clothes?"

  "No, nothing."

  "You didn't plan on coming back here, did you?"

  "It just sort of happened."

  She gave him the eye, led him upstairs and said, "You can take my parents' room, right here. Has its own bathroom and shower. Not much of my father's will fit you, but anything that does you can have. I'm down the hall."

  "I remember," he said.

  ~*~

  He dreamed of Mary Burke, the girl his father had killed.

  She was four or five years younger than him, but he vaguely remembered her from grammar school recess, when all the grades came out to play together. Burnished copper hair and large, almond eyes. A girl who usually sat alone watching the others without jealousy or interest, who preferred her own company. She usually carried a doll or a teddy bear. He was ten when he heard the news his old man had accidentally iced her.

  In his dreams she was always bleeding and lying in his arms and the playground was covered with crows. Sometimes he was yelling and sometimes he was attempting to soothe her while she sobbed. When he dreamed he'd tussle and kick and lash out. He'd wake up with his own voice in his ears and Joan would be holding her arm, her breast, asking him if he was all right. That's what kind of woman she was. Joan would stare at him and he'd know he'd had another of the dreams, but she would never tell him what he'd said, if he'd said anything at all. It wasn't until Morena that he found out that he'd cry out, You're my sister, Mary. Morena took it literally, thinking his old man had screwed around on the side and Mary was Crease's half-sister.

  Crease figured it meant that in his heart he knew his father had tied him to the little girl, making her a part of his life forever. The same way that Crease had made Morena a part of his life. Morena, the baby, even Tucco and his gunman Cruez. You couldn't make it through the world without a family. If you didn't have a family, you made one out of whoever was around, plucking them from out of the air.

  Mary Burke dying over fifteen grand. His father destroyed. Crease's mother gone, his adolescence dragged into hell, all for such an insignificant sum. Tucco used to carry twice that in his money clip, in hundreds, so he could tip the strippe
rs a C-note at a time.

  He awoke in the deep night and found Reb in bed with him, nude, laying back against the headboard, staring at him with the moonlight skipping playfully across her face. The wind had risen even more and the maples out front were swinging their branches in a savage dance.

  "You want the money, don't you? That's why you're back."

  "What money?"

  "The money your father stole and hid."

  "If he'd taken the money, he wouldn't have died a drunk in the gutter."

  "There must've been a reason. Everyone knows he shot that girl and took the ransom money."

  "They do, eh?"

  "Yes, and so do you."

  "He said he hid it and it was stolen from him."

  "So you do want it."

  "I want to know who wound up with it. I want to know

  why fifteen grand was enough to cost a girl her life."

  "Hell, that's more than enough reason to lead to murder anywhere, much less in Hangtree."

  She was right. He'd seen some of the Colombians take out a guy's eye for skimming a grand or two off the top. Crease had to remind himself that nobody really needed a reason to start a massacre. People were always reaching for some kind of answer.

  "You're going to kill him, aren't you?" she asked. "Who?"

  "Sheriff Edwards."

  Crease thought about it for a minute. "Maybe."

  "Why do you say it like that?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like you don't really care one way or another."

  "I don't know."

  "You could've killed Jimmy pretty easily. He's considered tough around here."

  "He's not."

  "You kept his knife. I like that. Taking it away from him like a kid who's been bad and doesn't deserve his toy."

  "I'm going to need a knife soon," Crease said.

  "Why?"

  It would come down to him and Tucco playing around with blades. As much as he tried, he just couldn't see himself shooting Tucco. There'd be a lot of talk and a lot of buildup, even some laughter along the way, but in the end Tucco would lash forward like lightning and Crease would have to be ready for it.