New Blood

by Shane Lusher

  So Vic was in on it, too, whatever ‘it’ was.

  Just how far did this thing go? How many people were involved? Again, whatever “this thing” was?

  The girls were watching something called The Who You Do, which apparently had to do with a bunch of teenage girls running around giving teenage boys haircuts. Looking at the television was giving me a headache, the picture flipping from image to image much faster than my caffeine-addled brain was capable of processing.

  Just then Kelly walked in.

  “Honey, I’m home!” she called out as she came in through the door to the garage. “Sorry I’m late. How are the kids?”

  She looked exhausted. She slumped down at a chair at the dining table to remove her shoes. Still, even with bags beneath her eyes, she looked good, and she was smiling at me. We hadn’t discussed sleeping arrangements yet, but I assumed since the girls were in the know that didn’t matter.

  How quickly the mind can change tracks.

  I walked over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t get too close to me,” she said. “I took a shower at the morgue, but I still smell like dead body. I need to take a bath.”

  “You get anything else?” I asked. I couldn’t smell anything, but I kept my distance out of respect for her personal comfort.

  “Nothing,” she said. She glanced at the girls, who didn’t seem to even have noticed that she’d come home.

  “I did everything,” she said. “Got no hairs. Tried to lift some prints off the body, but all I got was latex. Anyway,” she said. “Not my problem.”

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yes, just hot and stinky,” she said. And when I gave her a good ogle, she added, “And tired. And you have stuff to do, I know, so get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be back,” I said.

  “That’s good, because I’m not planning on waiting up.”

  I made it out of Pekin and turned off onto Springfield Road going toward Morton within ten minutes, taking the back roads, most of them unnamed, passing the town of Groveland before winding up on Route 98.

  By then it was nine-thirty, and full on twilight. I rolled down the windows and inhaled the dusty scent of the night air.

  Kelly’s autopsy had taken longer than expected, and I’d wanted to wait until she had finished with her bath after all. I knew that she’d probably let the girls stay up late and go to bed on her own, but there was something that didn’t set right with me about leaving her naked and wet in the bathroom with no one on watch outside.

  I’d decided to run over to Vic Daniels' house before I went in to see Percy, but just as I ran under the overpass at I-155, where 98 turned into Birchwood Avenue, my cell phone chirped.

  It was a text message, from Rassi.

  At the farm. Come by ASAP.

  As far as Rassi went, I’d decided by then that Percy was right. The best thing to do with Dave was to bring him in. He was an unknown, and whatever he knew he wasn’t telling. I didn’t even really know what his motivations were, but I’d felt sorry for him, and now I couldn’t remember why.

  If he was scared that someone on the police force was out to get him, same as Tad, then why wouldn’t he come clean with me? If someone had wanted Tad dead, they would have done so because of the information he’d discovered. And if Rassi had that information, why wouldn’t he give it to me? For that matter, why was he still alive?

  I’d decided that I was just dealing with a punk kid, who for whatever reason had his head in his ass. Someone may have had Tad killed, but Rassi didn’t know who it was and he didn’t have any leads. I’d gain more for Tad by helping clear out the open investigations. The one major person standing in the way of that was Rassi.

  Call me pragmatic, I didn’t know. I was tired. I wanted to get this thing over with. It had only been three days, and I was more confused now than I had been at the beginning, when I didn’t know anything at all.

  Before I got to the lane I saw that the lights were on in the living room, and downstairs, which was a good sign, though why the hell I thought that was beyond me.

  Any number of things could have been waiting for me in that house. Rassi could be holed up there, looking to take me out, for as yet unknown reasons. He could be someone’s prisoner, Rassi the bait set to lure me in.

  Thinking about that made me stop. I switched off my headlights and, after considering my options for a moment, I pulled off the lane and into the grass.

  I got the nine millimeter and an extra clip out of the glove department and put the gun in my waistband. If I needed more than thirty bullets, I had bigger problems to worry about.

  I left the car and listened to the corn moving in the slight breeze the summer downpour had left behind. The gravel was wet, which was good, because it dampened the sound, but the humidity was coming up in waves and I was sweating like a pig by the time I’d gotten to the bridge.

  I stopped to listen. The water running down out of Tremont had the creek all the way up to the bottom of the wood. I was surprised it had held. The rain had stopped hours before, and so the water level would be going down already. It would have crested sometime around seven P.M., which would have been above the level of the bridge.

  I was lucky the thing hadn’t completely washed out. It wouldn’t have been the first time. More importantly, out here, with the moon not yet risen, I could’ve just fallen the fifteen feet and bashed my head on the concrete below.

  At any rate, I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing from where I was standing. I left the lane in order to work my way out behind the house, where there were less windows and no lights.

  I went up to the kitchen side and listened. I thought I could hear water running, and maybe some music, but just then the air conditioner kicked in and I jumped.

  I walked around the back deck and tiptoed up onto it and looked in. I still couldn’t hear anything, but I could see that no one was in the kitchen. The dining room table was half covered in empty beer bottles.

  That was a good sign. I went around to the garage and let myself in the side door. Rassi’s car was there. I felt the surface of the hood with my fingertips. It was cold. Rassi had been there for several hours at least.

  I’d just put my hand on the door that led into the house when my phone went off.

  For all my stealth, my lack of planning showed in that. I grabbed at the phone and looked at the contact, picking it up at the same time. It was Alden Corcoran. I’d nearly forgotten I was waiting to hear back from him.

  “Hey, Dana, what’s up? Sorry it took me so long, but I-”

  “Can’t talk right now, sorry, Alden,” I whispered.

  “Can I—Dana?”

  I’d already hung up on him. I turned off the phone and pulled the nine millimeter out of my waistband.

  Then I twisted the knob in my hand.

  Forty-Seven

  The dog was dead.

  She’d waited the night before, and watched, slapping at the mosquitoes that had already come up. In spite of the cracked earth and the dried creek beds, they’d found a way to breed, to multiply.

  It had been five A.M., with the sun already licking up over the horizon behind the old man’s house when he’d opened the door in his pajamas and let the dog out. It had walked lazily across the lawn, squatted to leave its scat in the middle of the grass. After a moment, it had raised its head and sniffed.

  At the end, it crawled over beneath a pile of wood next to the garage, wiggled its way under the tarp there, its head thrown back, its eyes bulging, the muscles below its neck and the veins upon them standing out in the morning light.

  By the time the movement had stopped, it was already daylight, and the old man had been out searching for the dog. He’d found what was left of the cow liver and sniffed at it, then stood up to look out across the corn field and the cemetery beyond.

  He hadn’t seen her there, down in the hateful pollen stench of her filth. He’d gone back inside, limping, his oxygen tank in hand.
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  By then it had been full daylight, and she’d had to wait another day.

  Now the car was parked in the same field inlet she’d used when she’d done Sweeney. His house, what was left of it at least, was just a mile over and back from the old man’s.

  When she’d watched them take Tuan, she’d waited until they were gone and then went and got the car from the parking lot at the bowling alley and took it over to her apartment.

  Just a backpack in the trunk, this bit of unfinished business, and then she would be gone.

  She thought about Tuan. He had been the only living thing in the world that had been good to her.

  She knew that in an abstract sense: he’d gotten her out of that place, even adopted her and given her his last name, though he’d not gone as far as to call her his daughter, not to her face, and as far as she knew, nobody else knew about her.

  Except for the people who already knew about her, but they knew about a lot of people. For them, that was not a secret.

  She wondered what they all thought, in their houses and in their swimming pools, drinking their drinks and eating whatever it is that they ate when they all sat together and drank, and ate, and pretended as if they were normal. What did they think about it all? Were they afraid of what she was doing? Did they even know?

  When the old man was dead, they would know. They would be afraid. They would crawl out of the woodwork like rats deserting a sinking ship.

  Fingers would point, and then He would go down.

  But He had always been Tuan’s concern. She would leave him with that, and his nightmares, and the unbearable burden of his guilt. The dead ghost of his Father.

  Now she sat in the corn field, watching the darkened glass of the old man’s windows and wiggling her feet in the work boots she’d picked up that morning at Farm & Fleet, feeling the sweat drip down her back inside the plastic suit she was wearing.

  And willed him to return home.

  Forty-Eight

  I walked into the living room and glanced at all the bottles on the table. The television was on, but there was no sign of Rassi. I switched it off and then turned off the lights.

  Then I took the Ruger out of my belt and shucked a bullet into the chamber. I listened again. Still no sound.

  Quickly I went over to the door that led to the basement, a strip of light shining beneath it. Standing to the side, I reached over and turned the knob, flipping the door open and coming up in front of it with the gun raised as I did so.

  Nothing. I kicked off my shoes and worked my way down the carpeted steps as quickly as I could, took a deep breath, and then plunged down toward the floor. I came up in a crouch and raised the gun.

  I’d half expected to find him in a pool of blood, but Rassi was just conked out and snoring, the Nintendo in front of him on pause. There were even more bottles of beer here than upstairs. I judged that the bottles on the table in the upstairs kitchen had been last night’s binge. This one had apparently involved not a small amount of hard alcohol as well: there was a half-drunk bottle of mescal next to him on the floor, the worm still at the bottom, fat and bloated.

  He was lying there on the floor in his boxer shorts, his T-shirt crawling up his torso. His mouth was open and he was snoring, his eyelids a quarter of the way open and revealing the whites beneath.

  “Fucking creepy,” I said.

  So, not dead, not flown the coop, just drunk. Well, I could deal with drunks. I was one myself. I threw a blanket over him and then went about checking the rest of the house.

  I checked the bathroom and the bedroom in the basement, went back upstairs and looked in the office and the guest room to make sure no bogeyman was hiding, then I got myself a beer out of the fridge—there was only one left, in the kitchen at least—and sat down on the couch.

  I called Corcoran back.

  “Hey,” I said. “Dana. Sorry about that, I was-”

  “No problem,” Corcoran said. “Nothing on the alibis yet, but I got your list. I did your standard background check, a little bit of department of records stuff. I left out speeding and parking tickets, though. I figured you got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Wow, yeah,” I said. “Thanks. What you got?”

  “No time to talk, sorry,” he said. “My wife’s pissed because I told her I had to work late. Anyway, you want me to send this over to you?” he asked. “There’s quite a lot.”

  “Shit,” I said. I just realized I’d left my laptop at Kelly’s.

  “What?” Corcoran said. “You no like what I do for you?”

  “No, Alden, it’s great,” I said. “I just don’t have email access right now.”

  “You got your phone with you, right?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Forgot about that.”

  “Jesus, Dana, get some sleep. Anyway, it’s out. Let me know if you need anything else. Seriously, it’s no problem. Just not today. Tomorrow.”

  I thanked Corcoran and hung up, clicked refresh on my email, and pulled up the zipped document.

  There were just ten files, one for each person on the list, and I dumped them all to my reader and pulled up the one on Tuan.

  Nothing seemed to jump out immediately, other than what I already knew: that the Illinois State Police were keeping an eye on him and his associates, that he was under investigation for trafficking in child pornography. Known associates were Stevens and Sweeney. Roe didn’t make the roster.

  It did appear that Tuan had a daughter, however: Madeleine Nguyen, DOB 4/3/93, adopted 2/12/11.

  I didn’t know why that struck me as strange. Tuan just seemed to be the ultimate loner. I also hadn’t picked up anything on Google. Now that it had become apparent he had a daughter, though, and into child pornography, a few things seemed to slip into place.

  I had dialed Percy and he’d picked up before I remembered our conversation from before.

  “I found Rassi,” I said.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “At my farm,” I said. “He’s passed out.”

  “Bring him with you when you come in,” Percy said. “When are you coming in?”

  I didn’t answer that. “I got something on Tuan for you,” I said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “He’s got a daughter,” I said. “Adopted her at eighteen. Two years ago.”

  “So?”

  “So, I was just wondering.”

  “Dana, I don’t have time for this,” Percy sighed.

  “The urine on Sweeney’s body,” I said. “You said it came from a female.”

  Percy was silent for a moment.

  “Let me worry about that,” he said. “You just come in with Rassi. I need you working on those files.”

  “Wait-” I began, but he’d already hung up. “Shit,” I said.

  I went back downstairs and nudged Rassi with a foot, but other than moving him back and forth, it didn’t cause any change. No movement whatsoever. Just breathing.

  Before I went back upstairs, I pulled off the blanket and looked around the couch, searching for a weapon. I didn’t bother frisking him. There wasn’t much you could hide in a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt that you couldn’t see from the outside.

  Finding nothing, I replaced the blanket and went up to the main bathroom.

  I hadn’t emptied out the medicine cabinet since inheriting the place, and I was sure that my father had kept smelling salts in the cabinet. Why he’d had them or where the hell you got them, I didn’t know, but I knew what they were for.

  I located the package behind a moldy-looking sample tube of toothpaste (open, no lid) at the back of the cabinet. The expiration date said June 2003, but I figured there might still be some kick left.

  When I broke open the package under Rassi’s nose, his eyes shot open immediately and he backed up onto his buttocks, his hands flat on the floor.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What was that?” He sneezed once, two, three times, and when he was done I went over to the kitchenette next to t
he television and brought him back a piece of paper towel.

  “How long have you been asleep?” I asked.

  “What time is it?” Rassi asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “It’s around ten,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Rassi said. “I had beer with breakfast.”

  He didn’t seem sober to me, but he didn’t seem all that drunk, either.

  “Dave,” I said. “It’s over. You need to come in with me.”

  He backed up, scooting on his ass until he hit the sofa and then hoisted himself up onto it. “No way,” he said. “We need to figure something out.”

  “Why don’t you tell me where the hell you’ve been for the past two days?” I said. “Now. I have to get back to Percy.”

  “What, you’re working with Percy now?”

  “He seems to be a bit more straightforward than other people I know,” I said.

  “Can I get a beer?” he asked.

  “You stay where I can see you,” I said. “I’ll get the beer.”

  Rassi ran his hands through his hair and then spent some time working on his eyes. By the time he looked over in my direction I’d already returned. He took the bottle out of my hand and took a long pull.

  “Start,” I said. “Now.” He looked up at me. He’d changed quite a bit since the cocky detective who’d come by just a few days before. That had been Wednesday, and now it was Saturday. I judged that he’d been drinking nonstop since then. He hadn’t shaved, and probably hadn’t showered, either. His face was swollen, and his eyes were so bloodshot they looked jaundiced.

  “What’s up?” I asked. I sat down on the couch next to him and waited.

  “Okay,” he said finally. He’d drained his beer in one long, thirsty gulp, and was already staring at mine. “I think Dubois killed Tad.”

  “You told me that the other day,” I said. “You told me he supposedly switched the guns.”