by Layla Wolfe
“This seems to be his family account,” said Twinkletoes. “You know, just put on a face for family and high school friends.”
I took the phone. His “About” page said he was born in Taos, was an electrical engineer, and had 482 friends. His timeline had blurry photos as though enhanced with the “memory” filter of him in a football uniform, falling all over a picnic table with friends, and yes, even canoeing on a leafy lake. His most recent post was calling out a couple of old friends saying, “Hey, you guys, I’ll be in Taos the 11th if you want to go hit the old bird watching trails.”
“Bird watching?” I gaped. “Is this supposed to be some kind of fucking joke?”
“What I think,” said Twinkletoes, taking the phone back, “is this could very well be his real persona. The neo-Nazi persona is real too, but he has to keep them separate. Though check out these bird watching guys, Neil and Luke.” Twinkletoes tapped on over to Neil Someone’s page. He had a message for his birding friends, Simon and Luke.
Guys! Can’t wait to come to Havasu and see the brown pelicans and wood ducks. Let us pave the road with that black tar you mentioned.
What in the name of Hitler’s panties and matching bra set was going on? “Are you fucking trying to tell me these clean-cut assholes from Taos are purchasing my heroin from Karl or Simon or whatever the fuck his name is?”
“Doesn’t it sound like it?” asked Twinkletoes rhetorically.
The post was dated yesterday. Maybe we still had time.
“Okay,” said Anton. “Twinkletoes, call Flannery and find out where that sporting goods place is they’re squatting. We’ll have to confront them with weapons.”
I’d only fired my shotgun that once, when the pimp was chasing me across the truck stop parking lot. I was more of a lover, not a fighter. But I had accepted the heroin in the first place because I needed the money. I had to follow through. And I knew you couldn’t just aim a gun at someone unless you planned to shoot. And you didn’t just shoot them in the leg. The torso was the biggest target.
“Sounds good,” I agreed.
Twinkletoes went off to do the good father’s bidding.
I told Anton, “This is getting harder and harder to justify. I hope to fuck Slushy can push this through the courts.”
“I have a feeling that he has ways,” said Anton. “But first, I want to talk to you about your dream. We didn’t get a chance to this morning.”
“Yes,” I said. “It was an extremely lucid dream. I was aware I was dreaming, yet I was hovering above the entire scene as though watching a movie.”
The beer line had died down, so Anton steered me over to where the Navajo youth wiped down the bar. We ordered two Buds, the only beer they had, and were just settling onto stools when Dipstick Hunziger approached us sort of sheepishly. The gangling man had his fists deep in his jeans pockets and seemed mightily reluctant to talk, as though he forced himself to.
“Yes?” Anton asked, in that fatherly way that turned me on.
“I just gotta tell you guys. I think it’s great what you’re doing.”
Anton and I exchanged mystified looks. “Which thing?” I asked. We were doing several things.
He removed a hand from his pocket to wave it around. “The demon thing. Dealing with that deeply disturbed kid. My little brother, ah, in New York City, he was deeply disturbed too. Would hang neighborhood cats in our attic by their tails while still alive. Slit their stomachs. He wouldn’t eat them, though, but still. The similarities reminded me of my brother. I wish he’d of had someone like you to figure him out.”
I pointed. “Anton here has done a lot of work in New York City. What’re those boroughs, Anton?”
“Brownsville and East Harlem.”
Dipstick’s eyebrows raised. “We lived in Brownsville!”
Anton said, “I worked out of Our Lady of Mercy Chapel on Mother Gaston Boulevard.”
“I know it!” A shadow came over Dipstick’s face. “Not that we’d ever go to church. But there were plenty of crack heads for you to rehab. Thing is, maybe if Zippy would’ve gotten help from someone like you guys, he wouldn’t have, well, resorted to murder.”
“Murder,” I muttered, thinking about that poor father taking in his groceries.
“Yeah. They always say harming animals is a precursor to murder, right? Well, it was. Zippy wound up raping and strangling a few hookers before anyone figured out it was him.” Dipstick toed some sawdust on the ground. “No one puts much of a price on hookers, especially since we’re white and they were black, but he’s still serving twenty years, and he’s still loony as hell.”
We shook his hand and offered some platitudes. The whole thing drew a pall over our huddle—not that there was anything enlightening about analyzing a murder dream.
“Okay, let’s start again,” said Anton. “You were hovering above a scene. What scene?”
“It was daylight. Sun poured in the window. Someone’s living room—not a very fancy one, a house from the fifties I’d say. I was hovering at about head level, because suddenly I was behind Barclay’s bald head, almost as if I saw it from his point of view. I had the feeling he’d just walked in the front door, it wasn’t locked. A woman came out from like the kitchen, a shocked expression on her face.”
“As would someone be who just had a burglar enter her house.”
“Right. I heard her say ‘who are you?’ And then—I can’t believe he’d be this corny, but you never know—he goes ‘I am your worst nightmare.’ She started running back into the kitchen, maybe there was a back door, and Barclay chased her. Things were blurry for a few seconds. Suddenly she’s face down on the ground and he’s strangling her with his bare hands. It was weird, Anton. I didn’t feel the effort involved in strangling her, but my invisible arm muscles strained right alongside him.”
“Empathy. Everyone has an inner reality, King. It’s as valid as your exterior reality, and also the origin for it. This inner world gives you answers and solutions. You were able to feel the strain because you’re a true empath. The art of dreaming is a science repressed by our exterior reality.”
“Oh, that’s just plain creepy. If this is a talent, I’m not sure I want it.”
“It is a talent. You’re a natural dream-art scientist.”
It was a dubious honor. “Anyway, now it was like I hovered right above his back, watching her struggle less and less. When she seemed dead, he yanked her shoes and pants off. It was like he planned on raping her and thought better of it.”
“Impotence,” said Anton.
“Huh? How do you guess?”
“I know Barclay. He’s way too dysfunctional physically. He knows society expects it of him but can’t come up to speed.”
“So to speak. So he’s spewing all kinds of frustrated words. He goes to the garage, and this is the weird part, my spirit didn’t follow him. I stayed with the poor woman. She was just splayed out like one of those chalk outlines you see in The Naked Gun. He has an axe in his hand, like the kind you chop wood with. I got a horrified feeling then, but it wasn’t nearly the horror a normal person would feel.”
Anton nodded. “Your disembodied spirit is a lot less ‘emotional’ in the way we think of it.”
“He kneeled and hacked away at her neck. I don’t know if he was too feeble or what, but it didn’t work, at least if I assume he wanted to decapitate her. Sure, there was blood everywhere. But her head stayed in place. So he went to some butcher block on the counter and took out the biggest butcher knife. He got real detailed in getting between her vertebrae, and that’s how he severed her head.”
Anton sighed deeply and sucked down the last dregs of his beer. “And then what?”
“That’s when everything evaporated and I woke up back in my sleeping bag.”
Anton appeared deep in thought. “King, you have to probe the interior, not just the exterior universe. For some reason, you’re a part of this and you can’t disconnect yourself from it.”
“Much as I�
�d love to, this was obviously a murder he already did, or is about to.”
Twinkletoes appeared in the swinging doors of the bar. His wavy, unsteady silhouette nevertheless looked like the Terminator, full of some urgent news.
He beelined toward us, holding his phone out.
“Guys. There’s been a development over at the Nichols.”
Anton sighed again and lifted his empty mug to the bartender for another. “Oh, yeah?” he said cynically.
“You’re not going to fucking believe this.”
“Try us,” I said.
Twinkletoes said, “Remember when Barclay was yelling, ‘what’re you gonna do, keep me hidden in there like a jar with a head in it?’”
“Yeah,” I said, becoming intrigued. “I thought he really did have a jar with a head in his closet, but it was too dark to see.”
“Well.” Twinkletoes nodded soberly. “He’s got a jar with a head in it.”
Anton and I looked at each other, but it wasn’t in shock. It was more like a bland “what else is new” acceptance, a fresh wrinkle in a plot that just kept thickening. We nodded like seasoned vets.
“A woman’s head?” Anton asked.
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
Anton shut his eyes briefly, with patience. “Oye,” he muttered.
I asked Twinkletoes, “Is Dr. Moog still here? I think we need a consult.”
“I think so. You know, the funny thing about the head? I mean, except that it was, you know, a head in a jar. It was just covered wall-to-wall with flies, flies inside the sealed jar. Isn’t Beelzebub the Lord of the Flies?”
“Is he?” I asked wearily, rising. Life had committed a sea change on me when I hadn’t been looking. Now I was jaded and blasé about a demon covering a severed head with flies.
Q
T
he human head is about the same size as a roasted chicken,” said Dr. Moog, digging two forks into each temple of the decapitated head. King held down the plastic jar as Moog lifted the poor woman’s head from the liquid—water, I presumed. Dr. Moog was so entranced with the woman’s head he insisted on laying out a pink tablecloth on the kitchen counter. Finding a small roasting pan in a cupboard, he put this on the cloth, and the head plopped into the pan.
This event wasn’t even the scariest thing to happen that day. The first was that, upon returning to the Nichols, we discovered Barclay Samples had somehow levitated away. Clean off the premises. King and I asked Flannery if we could see the kid. He was utterly casual when he said “sure,” and seemed genuinely shocked when he removed the motorcycle chain from the office door and Barclay was gone.
Hands dangling at his sides, Flannery moaned, “He was here when we found the severed head.”
We sent Lily and Flannery down to see Vera, Chuck and Dave at the harbormaster’s office, the only other people who knew Barclay. He was so unaware of his own illness, it was plausible he’d said something to them about his murders.
Moog brought some of his own instruments—a thing that looked like a metallic dental pick, and a scissors I identified as a retractor.
“This head is fresh,” said Moog with relish. “Embalming fluid tends to solidify tissue, making it less pleasant to deal with.”
King, Twinkletoes, and I exchanged glances.
Twinkletoes asked, “Who is Barclay Samples, anyway? He must be friends with some high muckety-muck for us to even entertain the idea of making him a Prospect. He was never Prospect material to begin with.”
Even Moog shared our glance this time, since he was the one currently picking away at the “material” of the dead woman’s neck. His eyebrow did not waver as he said, “His father was close with Cropper, Ford Illuminati’s father.”
Ford Illuminati, everyone knew, was Prez of the Pure and Easy Bare Bones MC, so-called “mother club” of the Bent Zealots. I risked asking a sensitive question, but that was common with these bikers. “Didn’t Ford, ah, ‘rub out’ his own father?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Moog. “Once a blood bond has been established it’s good for life. Let’s just call Mr. Samples a mutual friend and be done with it. Twinkletoes, did our man at the PD identify this cadaver?”
It was odd that what was so plainly a blonde, even pretty woman under the age of thirty was merely a “cadaver” to Moog.
“Yes,” said Twinkletoes. “Guido reported that last night, when a Steve Shears of Beavertail Drive got home from work around nine, he found, ah, well he found various parts of his wife strewn about their home. She was three months pregnant. He yanked out her intestines and hung them from a floor lamp.”
I thought about my dildo and wondered if Beelzebub traveled far with Barclay.
“Your contact is named Guido?” asked King.
Twinkletoes nodded soberly. “Guido Appenfeller. Great guy. Almost gives pigs a decent name.”
Moog said, “This head was severed with a combination of implements. The first was an emotional or uncalculated attempt to chop away with something like a hatchet—“
“Or an axe?” asked King hopefully.
“—or an axe,” continued Moog smoothly. “Then it seems the killer abandoned that idea and went to town with a very sharp, maybe a kitchen knife.”
“A butcher knife,” King assured him.
Moog nodded. “Twinkletoes, did Guido have access to any photos of Mr. Shears’ wife?”
Twinkletoes tapped away at his phone while giggling to himself. “Beavertail Drive.”
The head was taking on the look of a Halloween mask. I remembered a mask an orphanage kid had had. It was probably supposed to be some Disney princess, but the outlines of the eyes and nostrils had collapsed, giving the girl the impression of someone who was wearing someone else’s face. That was the case now as Moog lifted skin and peered underneath it.
“Hands are weirder to dissect,” said Moog. “It’s like you’re holding someone’s disembodied hand.”
“Guido didn’t send any pix,” said Twinkletoes, “but here’s a Facebook pic of Nadine Shears.”
We all craned our necks to view the photo. We looked at the photo, then at the beheaded mask, then back to the photo. It was definitely the same woman.
King said, “Tell your guy Guido to put out a BOLO on Barclay. Don’t mention any murder. Just say he’s a missing person and we want him back. That’s all.”
Moog sat up straight, his dental pick in midair. He’d been probing the head as though prepping it for a facelift, separating layers, being careful with facial nerves. “You want to be careful. Sounds like Barclay is one of those disorganized killers. If the pigs pick him up, he’s liable to have a bag of blood on his person or be munching on some kidney.”
“But the idea is sound,” I said, supporting King. “He has no vehicle to be searching for, and he could be anywhere. We’d never be able to sleep at night if we didn’t at least try.”
“Has he been taking his meds?” asked Moog.
“He was,” said King, “but we ran out and there were no refills from the doctor at Mencken.”
“Show me the bottles,” said Moog, “and I’ll get you refills. This woman has had her blood drained. Notice how clear the water in the jar is.”
“Yes,” I said, “Barclay likes to drink the blood to prevent his own from turning to powder.”
“That’s not where my mind went,” said Moog, “but I’ve heard of such things. He could very well have some kind of vitamin deficiency.”
Twinkletoes said, “Let’s just hope Slushy can work his magic with the courts before Barclay kills again. The state loony bin is the place for him. I sort of feel sorry for him, his fucked youth, the way his parents either ignored or abused him.”
Moog said, “Hey, take some photos of this cadaver. You never know when we might need them.”
I took the camera from the shaky Twinkletoes and clicked away.
Moog said, “Are you going to stick around, Father? We could use someone like you.”
“I’
ve been considering it,” I said, as blandly as I could. King had said “I love you, Anton” in the desert, and I had just dismissed it as being the prolactin rush of a good submissive. Now I truly wondered. King often glanced at me sort of surreptitiously, as though looking for a reaction from me—or maybe just looking at my ass.
Did I love him? I could easily. But what were the odds of finding two men to fall in love with within such a short period of time? King was a sexy, lanky hunk, a genuinely kind man with the trademarked heart of gold. He was a ginger wolf with a juicy, fat prick. Since dominating him in the desert, I’d been craving to be topped by him. The memory of our first meeting at the Happy Hour brawl had been eating at the back of my consciousness. The intense way he corkscrewed his hips into my rear had me longing to be in that position again. I would get down on my knees with my wrists cuffed behind my back and slurp up his long cock like a dying dog.
“We could use a new truck driver,” said Twinkletoes, “but I know your back is messed up.”
We all looked at King. I held my breath waiting for his reaction.
“My back isn’t that bad anymore,” said King, “maybe since I really haven’t driven, especially not those long hauls. Or maybe . . .” His voice faded out. “Because of all the great weed.”
We chuckled. I went back to thumbing the shutter, making sure the puffy, lavender lips were in focus, but I was deeply moved to think King might stay. I tried to sound casual. “You’d enjoy it here a lot more than LA. Sounds like your dad needs to be in assisted living. Let your sister move on with her own plans.”
“That would be ideal,” said King, although I didn’t know which part he considered ideal.
“Yeah,” agreed Twinkletoes. “Talk to Turk. They’ll pay you at least your normal wages, and you won’t have to sit in a truck for forty-eight hours ruining your back.”
