City of Heretics

by Heath Lowrance

  Her hand dropped to her lap, still clutching the wad of cash. Very quietly, she said, “I shouldn’t have come to you in the first place. It was stupid of me.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “You… you obviously still have feelings for me.”

  He stood up. “You’re crazy. I don’t have feelings for you. I hate your guts.”

  She looked up at him. “Is that right? Then why are you helping me?”

  He set his teeth and snarled, “That’s a goddamn good question,” and started for the door.

  Halfway across the living room, she caught up with him, put a hand on his arm, and he turned to look at her, ready to put his fist across her face or shove her away or something, he didn’t know. But when his eyes met hers, something else happened and he grabbed her by her shoulders and pulled her to him.

  She didn’t stop him from kissing her, but she didn’t kiss back either. He tried to pretend he didn’t notice. He kissed her harder, moving his hand up and under her pajama top and squeezing her breast.

  She was breathing hard and her eyes were closed, but with his mouth pressed against hers she managed to say, “Crowe, no. No.”

  He stepped back from her, and she looked up at him. She was breathless and her face was flushed. Her voice, though, was steady and controlled. She said, “That’s a mistake. I’m sorry, but it’s a mistake.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What we had, Crowe… it’s gone.” Then, “No, that’s a lie. It’s not gone. But it should be. We were weak then, that’s what we were. But it’s different now.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I’m… well, the things I told you about the other day? I’ve been reconsidering them.”

  “Reconsidering.”

  “Yeah. I mean… I don’t know. Maybe leaving Chester isn’t such a good idea.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  She said, “It’s Tom. He needs a father. And Chester has been talking lately about—“

  “About giving it all up. Changing his ways.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “I feel like I should at least… I don’t know, give him the chance to do that. He’s not a bad man, really.”

  He wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter what sort of man Chester was; in another week, maybe less, he was going to kill him, so it didn’t matter. But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Right, Dallas. Give him a chance, sure.”

  “You’re clearly exhausted,” she said. “Why don’t you sleep here tonight? On the sofa. We can talk more in the morning.”

  “No thanks. I’ll get going.”

  “Please? We’ll have a couple more drinks, and then you can get some sleep, and everything will seem clearer in the morning. Okay?”

  He sighed. “Okay,” he said.

  It was still dark when he opened his eyes, the only light streaming in dimly from a security light outside in the building’s parking lot. He was sprawled out on the sofa, a throw blanket draped over him and his shoes off. The boy was sitting on the edge of the coffee table, staring at him.

  Crowe looked at him and the boy cocked his head. “Hello,” he said.

  Thin, pale like his mother. In the darkness Crowe couldn’t tell what color his eyes were. His disheveled hair was light, maybe dirty blond or brown. He seemed to be glowing.

  The boy said again, “Hello. Who are you?”

  “Nobody,” Crowe said.

  “You’re somebody.”

  “Okay.”

  Crowe sat up woozily. He was still drunk. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. I got up to get a drink of water and I saw you. Are you a friend of my mom’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded. “My dad’s at the doctor’s house. Are you here to do dad stuff until he gets back?”

  “No. What? No. Go away.”

  He frowned. “This is my house, I don’t have to go away.” Then, “You smell like alky-hol.”

  Crowe rubbed his temples, thought about getting up and leaving, but the idea of moving at that moment was too daunting. Instead, he lay back down.

  “Are you an alky-holic?” he said.

  “No. I hardly ever drink,” Crowe said, and then wondered why he bothered explaining it. He didn’t want to see this kid. He didn’t want to talk to him, drunk or otherwise.

  “My name’s Tommy. Tom. I was named after a famous American. What’s your name?”

  “Crowe.”

  The boy smiled. “Crow, like the bird? Crows eat dead stuff off the road. Why do you have a bandage on your face? Did you hurt yourself?”

  “You need to go back to bed. Your mom would be mad if she knew you were up.”

  “No she wouldn’t. My mom doesn’t get mad about stupid stuff like that.”

  “Kid,” Crowe said. “Go away.”

  “But—“

  “Go away!”

  The boy jumped, surprised, and looked at him. For a second Crowe thought he was going to burst into tears, but instead he shrugged. “Fine. Be a jerk, see if I care.” He stood up and walked with as much dignity as a seven-year-old could back to his room.

  Crowe had a hard time getting back to sleep after that. He kept seeing the boy’s white face, glowing in the soft light. Eventually, though, he slept.

  It couldn’t have been more than three hours later he sat up, head pounding and muscles screaming.

  The money he’d given Dallas was tucked in one of his shoes. The bottle was almost empty on the table, and he realized that he drank most of it; he didn’t remember Dallas having more than two drinks.

  Stupid. His tolerance for booze wasn’t up for that sort of challenge.

  He threw a couple of pain pills down his throat, forgetting all about his resolve to stay clear-headed, and in the next room he could hear activity—the sounds of the household coming awake. Through the bedroom wall, he heard Dallas saying, “Well, good morning, sleepyhead,” and the muted giggling of the boy.

  He couldn’t see him again. He stood up quickly, grabbed his overcoat, and headed for the door.

  Fast food for breakfast, a greasy sausage and egg combo, and as soon as he finished it he was in the restaurant’s bathroom, throwing it back up. He needed some goddamn aspirin and another ten hours of sleep.

  His place was too far away, so he got back in the Jag and headed for Faith’s, in Midtown. It would be hard, explaining what he was doing back, but he needed a place to be for at least a couple of hours.

  There was no answer when he knocked. She usually worked until two in the morning, was in bed by three, and slept until ten-thirty or eleven. She was a light sleeper, so he knocked again, a little louder.

  Still no answer. He tried the door, and it was unlocked.

  That wasn’t like her at all. Checking to make sure the place was locked up before she went to bed bordered on being a compulsion with her.

  He went in and said, “Faith?”

  Nothing. He made his way through the living room, saying again, “Faith? It’s me.”

  The living room looked normal, nothing disturbed, no signs of visitors, legitimate or otherwise.

  Except for one thing: a shoe-print on the carpet, just outside the bathroom. A fairly large print, edged in dark red.

  He’d remembered his revolver this time, and his hand went into the coat pocket and rested on the butt.

  The bedroom door was open, as usual. He went in and stopped just inside the doorway.

  Faith was in bed.

  Most of her was, anyway.

  The bed was soaked with blood and the carpet around it stained a dark ugly red. She’d been opened up from throat to pelvis, and the gaping hole of her torso was like a giant red mouth, half-open. It smelled like an abattoir.

  Pieces of her had been arranged on the bed next to her. Some other pieces were on the floor at the foot of the bed, like bedroom slippers. They were organs, but Crowe couldn’t tell which ones.

  He stood there for a few
seconds. And then he went back to the front door, made sure it was locked. He did a quick sweep of the apartment, checking behind the sofa and in the hall closet and anywhere else someone could hide. He looked in the bathroom, being careful not to step on the bloody shoe print. Then he went back in the bedroom and, not looking at the thing on the bed, checked the closet there.

  He thought about looking under the bed, but it would have required slinking through the mess of blood and gore and he wasn’t sure he was up for that. There was less than four inches between the floor and bottom of the bed anyway.

  He stepped back and looked at Faith. Her eyes were open, staring blandly at the ceiling.

  He felt a lot of things all at once, but pushed them away. There was no time for any of that. Faith had a small vanity table next to the bed, and he pulled the chair over from it and sat down and thought.

  Opened up, parts of her pulled out. Just like Patricia Welling. Just like Jezzie Vitower. And just like fourteen other women he didn’t know, would never know. Victims of Peter Murke.

  But it didn’t have to be Murke. Just because the MO was the same wasn’t evidence that Murke had done this. He had buddies, old Peter did, buddies that rescued him from the transport van and Vitower’s wrath. Buddies that went after anyone who got too close. Maybe one of them did this.

  Crowe wondered if Faith was being slaughtered at the same time he was fighting Goth-Boy. He couldn’t see or smell any signs of decay, so it had to have happened fairly recently.

  He stood up, took a step toward the bed, and placed his fingers on Faith’s eyelids. He gently closed them.

  Her face was clean and unstained by the blood that covered everything else. Which was lucky, because otherwise he never would have noticed the symbol carved into her temple.

  He bent over to get a closer look, being careful not to touch anything.

  It had happened after death, and hadn’t bled much. A small cross, it looked like, small enough that a regular knife wouldn’t have been able to slice it in such detail. A razor blade then, or an exacto knife, something like that. The arms of the cross bent downward, and it was topped by what looked like a heart-shape, balancing at the top of the cross like a fat man on top of a pole.

  It nagged at the back of his brain. He’d seen that symbol before, he was sure of it. But he couldn’t remember where.

  He let his anger take charge then, if for no other reason than to smother the guilt. In the closet, he found a large wool comforter and took it to the bed and covered Faith’s body. He’d have to call the cops. After he’d gotten far away from there, of course.

  Someone pounded on the front door, hard.

  He went cold and his hand reached for the revolver in his coat pocket. He didn’t move.

  There were a few seconds of silence, and then more pounding. “Open the door, Crowe,” Detective Eddie Wills said. “I saw you go in, you sonofabitch. Open the goddamn door.”

  Crowe went silently into the living room, eyes peeled on the front door. He heard Wills in the hall outside, huffing impatiently, and could see him in his mind, that long sad horse face, that booze-ruined nose, and big gnarled hands ready to knock the goddamn door down if he had to. Like he’d said, he wasn’t the sort to worry about due process.

  Crowe could let him in. Close the door to Faith’s bedroom, act like everything was normal, play it cool. But Wills was an observant bastard, and if Crowe could spot the bloody shoe-print outside the bathroom, he could too.

  Wills pounded again. “Crowe, I will knock this fucking door off its fucking hinges if you don’t open it right now.”

  He would’ve known Crowe had nothing to do with this: it was the kind of work that took time. But Crowe didn’t trust him.

  He went back into the bedroom, closed the door behind him. Despite his best efforts, it clicked shut audibly and Wills pounded harder on the outside door.

  Crowe moved across the bedroom to the window, opened it up. Faith lived on the second floor. There was a drop of about fifteen feet to the icy grass below.

  Normally, Crowe wouldn’t have had any qualms about it, but in his current state it made him nervous. No matter what, the landing would hurt.

  But what the hell. He had a pocket full of pain killers, may as well use them.

  He could still hear Wills through two closed doors. “Fine, Crowe, that’s how you wanna play it,” he said, and then he was smashing at the door. Crowe heard the lock rattling hard, the muted sound of Wills’ shoe kicking the wood.

  Crowe eased himself through the window, and heard the front door giving way with a terrific crash.

  “Crowe!” Wills said, and Crowe heard him storming through the living room.

  Crowe jumped from the window.

  He landed on his feet and rolled left, trying to minimize the damage to his right shoulder. It hurt like a bitch regardless, and so did the wound in his back, and he had a split second of not wanting to move once he’d come to rest on the cold earth.

  But he made himself stand up and risked a glance up at the open window. From the bedroom, Wills voice boomed, “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  Crowe ran. From the corner of his eye he saw Wills’ head sticking out the window and Wills screamed, “Freeze, Crowe!” but of course Crowe didn’t.

  He scrambled around the side of the building and toward the parking lot where he’d left his car. A young couple pushing a baby stroller got in the way, and Crowe shoved the man aside, causing him to nearly fall into his wife.

  “Hey, what the hell, man, take it easy!” the man said, and the baby started screeching. The wife yelled at Crowe’s back, being pretty creative about his anatomy and what he could do with it.

  He had his keys out when he reached the Jag, started to unlock it, when the side view mirror shattered and the crack of a gunshot echoed across the parking lot.

  Wills stood at the far end of the lot, just in front of the apartment building, about fifty feet away. He was in classic shooting stance, the kind they teach you in police training, and his pistol was leveled at Crowe. It surprised Crowe that the cop remembered anything from his training.

  “Don’t move, Crowe, or so help me I’ll put the next one in your head!”

  The woman stopped yelling at Crowe and started yelling at her husband and they grabbed the baby out of the stroller and ran in the other direction.

  Crowe got in the Jag, started it up. Another bullet shattered the glass in the rear passenger window.

  He ducked low, threw the Jag into gear and pushed the gas. The tires screeched on the blacktop and the Jag shot forward. Wills fired again, but if the shot went anywhere near, Crowe couldn’t tell. He jumped the median that separated the two sections of parking lot, jerked the wheel to the right and between two other parked cars, and accelerated toward the street.

  Wills was running hard toward him, gun out, firing. Crowe heard two bullets hit metal before he made the street, took a left, and sped away. He glanced back just once, saw Wills shoving his gun back in its holster and making a break for his car. As big a loose cannon as he was, he’d still call for back-up on this one, and Crowe knew he could expect cops to swarm any minute.

  He hit Union Avenue, merged his way into traffic heading west, back toward downtown. His fingers were tight on the steering wheel. He pushed the Jag up to forty-five, as fast he could risk it, weaving in and out of slower traffic like one of those assholes you see during rush hour who think shaving a few minutes off the drive-time is worth risking lives over.

  But in this case, it was definitely worth it.

  A police cruiser sat at the corner of Union and Manassas, and just as he passed it he saw the driver eyeing him, talking into his radio, and starting his engine in a hell of a hurry.

  The cop hit his lights and siren and pulled out after him.

  Crowe banked hard to the right, cutting off a Honda Civic, barreled into the mouth of a narrow alley. He kept it at about forty miles an hour. If someone decided to pop out in front of him, that would be pretty go
ddamn unfortunate for them.

  Nobody jumped in front of the car, though. He cleared the alley, cut right again, and wound up on Madison.

  He cursed under his breath. Madison wasn’t a straight shot; it angled off and bled right into Union, where he’d just come from. He had to stop driving randomly, work out some sort of plan. He’d been away too long and didn’t know the lay of the land as well as he should have.

  More sirens wailed from somewhere nearby, but he couldn’t see them. He got stopped at the light, just in time to see another police cruiser speed by, heading west. The light turned green and Crowe turned left, back in the direction he’d come from. There was a chance that the first cruiser hadn’t seen him cut into the alley, although how the cop could have missed it was beyond him.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, the fumble would actually buy him a little time.

  He drove fast up Union, risked staying on it for two miles. He didn’t see any cops, didn’t hear any sirens. It was a lucky break, but the luck wouldn’t hold. He had to get rid of the Jag, right away.

  At the next light, he took a right, and then another right, and a left through another alley and wound up on Sam Cooper, heading north. A sad-looking strip mall occupied the next intersection he came to. He pulled into it, found a parking spot between two SUV’s, and cut the engine.

  For about a minute, he sat there and listened for sirens. Didn’t hear any.

  He got out of the car, tossed the keys on the seat. The strip mall parking lot wasn’t exactly heavy with pedestrians. An old man was just coming out of a Greek restaurant, jingling his keys. He nodded at Crowe as he passed and Crowe nodded back. A group of teenagers, being rowdy and hilarious, were getting out of a tan Ford Taurus and heading toward the video game store. They didn’t look at him.

  Crowe waited for the old man to get in his pick-up truck and pull out, and then he started perusing the parking lot for a suitable vehicle.

  He settled on the Ford Taurus. It was a pretty inconspicuous car, and he had the advantage of knowing the teenagers wouldn’t be coming out right away. They’d even very thoughtfully left the door unlocked.