by Tom Schreck
“Why would he call me moments after doing this?”
“Call Morris, now.”
“Fine,” I said.
I went home and called Morris and he came over, this time by himself. He asked what, where, when, and how questions and left. Al remained calm and I guess Morris’s fascination with me as a source of information had diminished. It was now heading toward eleven; I didn’t feel like heading back to AJ’s and there was no way I felt like sleeping. The Yankees were off and there was nothing on the tube and I didn’t feel like drinking much, so I decided to take a ride.
Al came along and we headed out Route 11 West just to go someplace different. Elvis was doing his rocking gospel number “I’ve Got Confidence,” from the early ’70s, and he was doing an outstanding job. Forty-five minutes into the ride I decided to head over to where they discovered the bodies just to see. A half an hour later, I pulled up to a field lit by portable spotlights that, along with the misty late-summer rain, cast a surreal glow over the entire area. It looked like an alien landing spot or a spot being preserved for something supernatural. It just looked out of place.
I parked on the side of the road and walked with Al toward the yellow tape until a uniformed cop stopped me.
“Crime scene, sir. You’ll have to move on,” he said.
“Sure, I couldn’t sleep and just wanted to see this,” I said. The cop didn’t say anything at all. Though there were a handful of police types around it didn’t look like anyone was doing anything.
I moved along and started to head back to the Eldorado when I thought of something. I stopped and Al looked up at me.
What could I lose?
I looked back down at Al and our eyes met.
“Go find!” I yelled.
Al’s nose went to the ground and he worked around a circle. This was weird because although I gave him the command, I had no scent source. Al could pick up the smell of a rabbit and I could wind up in the woods for the rest of my life. What the hell, I wasn’t going to sleep and I didn’t have to get up for work tomorrow.
Al circled, paused, looked up, put his nose back to the ground, and moved forward. Al had a scent and he was after it. He took me down to the road ahead of the Eldorado and stopped. He looked up, looked left and right, put his nose down, looked back up, and wrinkled his brow. Then, the nose went back down and he moved forward slowly and deliberately with his tail straight out, which I think meant he was on to something. He moved ahead steadily, if not quickly, but stayed in a straight line along the road.
A mile and half ahead there was a crossroads, and without hesitation Al made a left. He moved on, never lifting his nose from the ground, and he kept going. There was a light mist falling, and little by little I had gotten soaked all the way through my T-shirt and jeans. My watch told me it was a quarter to two in the morning and Al had been on this trail for two hours. I couldn’t have stopped him at this point if I wanted.
Forty-five minutes later, Al stopped and took a crap. Then, he resumed for ten more feet, stopped, sniffed, looked up, looked down, looked left and right, and put his nose back down. There were tire tracks in the mud in the side of the road. In fact, there were what appeared to be two sets of circular tracks that headed back in the direction we came, like someone met at this spot and then turned around together. I was still looking at them when I felt Al tug me in the exact direction we came from. Retracing the same path, we were back on the scent.
At three fifteen, we were at the crossroads and Al got confused. He started to take the left, hesitated, and went in the direction we originally came from but started looking back and walking with his nose up. Before long his nose left the ground and it was clear he was off whatever he set out after. If there were two cars maybe one made the turn and one didn’t, or maybe they got out on foot, or maybe there was a rabbit that ran around and doubled back. Shit, maybe a pizza-delivery guy spent the night looking for a house, turned around, and then got back on track by making a left at the crossroads.
It was after four when I got back to the Eldorado. Al was moving pretty slow and it had been a long night. The spotlights were still shining and I headed up the brushy knoll for another look at the scene. The cops weren’t milling around, and I figured they had finally got permission to call it a night. That seemed weird to me, but I didn’t get a chance to think it through because Al had given me a wicked tug. He pulled me hard for about twenty feet through the wet, high grass, sniffing like crazy.
Al stopped and I saw what was making him crazy.
The cop we were talking to earlier was lying in the grass with half of his face blown off.
32
A while back I had seen some dead people. Kelley shot a guy in the back of the head as the scumbag was about to rape a little girl. The term “blown his head off” is so overused that it’s meaningless until you’re standing in front of someone when it happens. There was blood all over, and the image of what was a breathing human being now was right there for you to contemplate, shattered and oozing life. For whatever reason, I remember the smell.
There was a smell of gunfire and there was the almost metallic smell of blood, and there was something else—what I perceived was the smell of death.
I was going in and out of the present while I looked down at the dead cop and the video of the other death I saw played in my head. The corner of the top of his head and the eye on that side of his face was gone while the other eye remained closed. A wave of the smell reached me and I puked without having a chance to bend over.
The yakking brought me back into the present as only barfing can do, but I knew I was going to be battling nightmares and what I called “daymares” all over again. I didn’t feel real and I had no idea how much time had elapsed. Al was sitting at my feet, at attention, sensing something untoward and important was happening. His nostrils never stopped moving even while the rest of him remained still.
I started to breathe heavily and I could hear my heart beating when a voice shook me back to the moment.
“Help me … help …” The voice came from the field, and it was close.
Al ran twenty feet ahead and stopped, his tail straight out.
I followed and came across another uniformed cop bleeding hard from the chest. He was a light-skinned black guy with a weightlifter’s build, and his uniform was soaked with blood. A deep scarlet hole to the left side of his chest seeped blood like a sump pump.
“Oh God … ,” I heard myself say. I didn’t have any idea what to do, so I ripped off my T-shirt and placed it over the wound. The cop sucked in a few painful breaths, but otherwise he was barely breathing.
“Call … call …” He pointed to his radio.
I pushed the yellow button on the side and said “hello” several times until some sort of dispatcher responded. I don’t know what I said, but he said something about ambulances and not to go any place.
I kept my T-shirt in place and my head drifted away. I think I threw up a few more times and I know I was shivering, but everything that was happening was blurry. Then there was some activity and I remembered seeing Kelley’s face and the look on it. Then a detached voice said, “They’re all dead.”
The next morning I came to in the spare bedroom in Rudy’s house. Al was sleeping next to me and I awoke feeling half drunk. Rudy poked his head in the doorway; he was wearing a ratty robe that probably used to be white. He was sipping coffee.
“Valium, kid. Trust me, you needed it,” he said.
I tried to talk and it didn’t make much sense to me, but Rudy handed me a cup of coffee. Al sat up and just looked at me. He didn’t fuss or bark, which was weird enough on its own.
“You remember much from last night?” Rudy asked.
“I remember dead cops … one still alive, lots of blood. What the hell happened?” I said.
“They were ambushed. All
four are dead. You blacked out and went into shock when the cop you were helping died.”
“How’d I get here?”
“Kelley brought you around eight.”
“What time is it now?”
“Four.”
“Who did it?”
“They have no idea.”
The coffee was helping and so was the conversation. I didn’t feel like things were real.
“What’s it mean to go into shock?” I asked.
“Your body shuts off when it’s had too much either physical or psychological shit happen too fast. It can be dangerous but you’re fine … physically, anyway.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Kid, take it easy for a while. Read some books, rent some Elvis movies, walk the dog …”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, I know. Like there’s a chance in hell of that happening,” Rudy said.
By nine that night the Valium was out of my system, so I decided to add some Schlitz to it. I didn’t feel like sitting around the Blue by myself getting weirder by the minute. I headed to AJ’s, and Elvis and “One Broken Heart for Sale” on the way helped—Elvis always helped.
I was heading in the front door when I heard Billy’s voice.
“Sir!” he said, wheeling his bike out from behind the side of the cookie factory. I could see the spokes of the bike but I couldn’t see Billy.
“Billy?”
“Here, sir.” He pulled his ninja mask down to show his face. I thought to myself that life couldn’t get much weirder.
“What’s going on?”
“Are you okay, sir?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I heard about your night, sir.”
“How did you hear about my night?”
“I have a police scanner, sir.”
“Yeah, well, I’m okay. Shouldn’t you be home?”
“Sir, I wanted to check on you, sir.”
“Billy, you don’t need to check on me. Go on home.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Billy said and then peddled away.
Well, it was good to know I had a ninja guardian angel/stalker looking out for me.
The boys were in and at it. Tonight they were absorbed in the Kennedy assassination.
“The mafia was up there in the suppository,” Rocco said.
“I think you mean ‘depository.’ The Texas School Book Depository,” Jerry Number Two said.
“What the hell was that, anyway?” Jerry Number One asked.
“That’s where they kept the books for kids in school,” TC said.
“But it was November and the kids were in school. Why did Texas have so many extra books?” Rocco asked.
“I don’t know, but that’s where Lee Wilkes Booth shot him,” TC said.
“You mean Lee Harvey,” Jerry Number One said.
“Lee Harvey? That’s the guy who does the radio news and says ‘Lee Harvey … Good day!’” Rocco said.
“That guy shot Kennedy? When did that come out?” TC asked.
Kelley was drinking and looking straight ahead, oblivious to everything else.
“Sorry, Kell.” It was all I could think of.
“Jackson’s wife is pregnant with their second. They have a three-year-old,” he said.
“Do they have any idea who?”
“No, none. It’s gotten very strange. They tried talking to you and you gave them what you knew in between passing out. You okay?”
“Yeah—it brought back some of the shit from last time.”
“Don’t mess with that shit, Duff.”
“I know.”
We sat in silence through two more beers each. Finally, Kelley broke it.
“I know this goes against everything I ever say to you, but if you come up with something, make sure you let me know,” he said.
33
The next morning found me far less than bright eyed and bushy tailed. I guess a Valium/Schlitz double-header will do that to you. Al joined me for coffee and he still continued to look me up and down like he didn’t know what to make of me. There was no Walter Payton runs through the Blue, no barking like crazy, and no remote teething. He just kept an eye on me.
“I’m fine, now leave me alone,” I heard myself say to the basset hound I shared my life with.
I sat at the kitchen table, drinking a pot of coffee and thinking about what I had learned in the last couple of weeks. I had set out to save Howard, who was letting me know he was being set up only to have him change up in a matter of days and not only confess but threaten me if I continued to try to help him. I found out about this drug, “Blast,” that killed a bunch of inmates years ago when Howard was inside, and a suspicious graduate student that disappeared around that same time. That grad student later became a psychiatrist named Gunner who traveled around the country from job to job, and whatever city he appeared in there were unsolved murders. Then, as of a few years ago, Dr. Gunner fell off the radar screen completely.
So either Howard is the vicious murderer everyone tells me he is and I’m a big sap, or this Gunner guy had something to do with the Blast and the murders and is somehow in Crawford killing people because, well, that’s what he does. The fact that some of the current victims had drugs in their systems may actually fit in with that. Of course, kids having drugs in their systems could mean what it does all over this country—that kids do a lot of drugs.
There was a third alternative. Maybe it wasn’t Howard and it wasn’t Gunner and it had nothing to do with drugs. Maybe it was a group of copycat murderers who had taken their fascination with killing to the next level.
I was doing my best to be as logical and as strategic as absolutely possible. The Schlitz and Valium notwithstanding, it felt good to organize it into arbitrary categories even if all it gave me was the perception of logic. The fact of the matter was that Howard was missing, and even though he periodically contacted me, he never spoke long enough for anyone to trace the call and his cryptic messages gave me no real information, especially lately. The last several messages repeated the same message and tried to warn me off.
That suggested to me that I should do as much research on Dr. Gunner as possible. I knew employment dates and I knew the unsolved murders during his tenure, but I knew little else. I wasn’t clear exactly what I could find out that would be helpful, but it felt like the direction I should head toward. Rudy had tipped me off to a national registry for physicians and their license history, which I ran down in the hospital library. Gunner’s license had no sanctions or censures, and he didn’t have any lawsuits during his time as a doctor.
He kept up with his continuing education credits and there were positive citations or awards. He sounded like your run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. I decided to call his previous employers again just to see what kind of feel I could get for the guy. The place in Seattle refused to disclose any more information than they already had. The Mississippi hospital referred me to administration, and they said they’d have to get back to me. I began to realize that if I continued to go the quasi-legitimate route then I was likely to get no useful information.
I tried a different strategy when I called the place near Milwaukee. I described myself as an old med-school buddy who was getting a reunion trip together and said that I wanted to find my ol’ buddy “Guns.” The HR director thought about it a bit and transferred me to the hospital medical director, who only knew Gunner as an acquaintance but seemed to remember an OR nurse he was friendly with. She now worked in a clinic off-site from the hospital, and I waited while he found me her number.
Leslie Roy worked at a women’s health center, and I called her right around lunchtime.
“Sure, Dr. Gunner and I were … uh … close for a while. I mean we dated and it didn’t work out, but we remained f
riendly,” she said when I reached her.
“Do you ever hear from him? We’re trying to get the guys together for a cruise. You know, to remember the old days in med school,” I said, trying my best to sound like a carefree, fun-loving doc.
“He left here to care for a friend who was dying. He was a very committed friend once you got to know him.”
“Geez, what happened?”
“There was another doctor who worked here at the same time about the same age as Dr. Gunner. They became close friends when the doctor was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Gunner left to take care of him.”
“Wow, are they still in the area?”
“I don’t believe so. I think he moved him to Arizona or New Mexico. The other doctor was estranged from his family, so Dr. Gunner was all he had.”
“I don’t know how to ask this but—” She interrupted before I could finish.
“I never did hear if the other doctor died, but it has been a few years now, so I don’t see how he could’ve made it this long.”
“What was the other doctor’s name?”
“God, it’s terrible, but I can’t remember. He was some sort of specialist, so we didn’t see him a lot. I can’t remember.”
“Well, Guns doesn’t show up on any medical registries so it’s really hard to find him. If you think of the other doc’s name that might help a bit. Call me if you think of it, okay, hon?” I said.
She agreed to and I gave her good ol’ Dr. Dombrowski’s home phone number. I’m not sure what all of this told me except that Gunner disappeared and the funky murders where he lived stopped. That, or wherever he was in the interim had a series of unsolved gruesome slayings, but that was impossible to prove or disprove. The only thing that traced him back to this area was grad school, and he fled after suspicious circumstances. It didn’t make sense that he would come back here.
Not that the lifestyles of serial killers ever made any sense.
I flipped on the TV just to try to let my mind think of something—anything—else for a while. The TV turned on to MSNBC, the channel that I was watching last, and they were in the midst of a “Crawford Slaying” report.
