Dead Heat with the Reaper

by William E. Wallace

  “You may find this hard to believe, Mr. Trask, but he was a wonderful man when we first got married,” she said, her voice barely audible. “He was kind, considerate. Then he lost his job. And when I first got pregnant with Lucy a little more than a year ago, he started to change. I don’t know what happened. I hoped he would snap out of it, but he never did.”

  She paused as memories crowded her mind. “He would sit and look at me for hours without saying anything,” she added, closing her eyes in pain as she relived the last twelve months. “Then he started going out and getting drunk, almost every night. The first time he hit me was when he came back from the bar one night and I asked him what was wrong. He said he couldn’t trust me anymore. He said he thought the baby growing inside me wasn’t his, that I had sex with somebody when he was gone looking for a new job. He called me all sorts of names.”

  Frank spread his hands. “Everybody in the building knew he was beating you. Why didn’t you ask us for help?”

  “I kept hoping he would change,” she said so quietly he could barely hear. “I kept hoping he would get better.”

  Then she burst into tears again, crying in racking sobs.

  Trask was amazed by some people’s capacity for love, even in the face of unbelievable cruelty.

  He picked up the suitcase and put it on the bed beside her and the baby.

  “Natalie,” he said. “You and Lucy are on your own now. You have to start over. I want you to take what’s in this suitcase; it will help you make a new beginning.”

  Then he went away and left her with her baby and her grief.

  ***

  “Oh, man!” Ferdie said, excitedly. “How much money was in that case again?”

  “Four hundred grand,” Trask said, sipping his Seven and Seven. “That’ll keep them going for a while. She’s going to be all right. If she could take all the shit that asshole was handing out, she can get back on her feet with the help of that money.”

  “Jesus,” Habersham said. “With four hundred gees, I really could get my ashes hauled to Winnemucca and back. Hell, I could buy into Mustang Ranch and get the shareholder discount!”

  Trask grinned. “If you spent all $400,000 on Viagra, you probably couldn’t get hard enough to put on a condom, Bill.”

  Even Habersham joined the laughter this time.

  “So you just got this idea on the spur of the moment when you heard this girl’s old man had croaked?” Jorgensen asked. “Right out of the clear blue sky?”

  His voice had the same edge it might if Trask had offered him a deed to the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Trask looked at him blandly, the picture of innocence. “Yeah. Just like that. Why?”

  “Where were you when this shitbird fell, Frank?” Jorgensen asked.

  Frank’s face turned red. “I was in my room, Sam.”

  Jorgensen looked at him thoughtfully.

  “It seems like an interesting coincidence to me,” he said. “You find out you have all this money saved up; the girl’s psycho husband sends her to the hospital; then the psycho just happens to fall 50 feet onto his neck in a freak accident a few hours later. The next day you give his widow your life savings. Lucky girl.”

  “Well, that’s how it happened,” Frank said testily. “Believe it or not.”

  “Whatever,” Sam said. “It looks to me like she may have been more than lucky. Like maybe Lady Luck had a helper.”

  He and Trask locked eyes momentarily. Then Jorgensen smiled. “But that’s all just speculation, of course.”

  Trask gave him a nervous look. “I hope you don’t discuss your speculation with anybody else. Like the cops, for instance.”

  Jorgensen looked hurt. “Frank, you know I don’t talk to cops.”

  “So what are you going to do with the rest of the money, Frank?” said Ferdie, who, like Habersham, had no idea what Jorgensen and Trask were talking about.

  Frank turned and signaled to Brundage at the bar. He came to the table carrying a tray of fresh drinks.

  “I invested it in a local business,” Trask said as Joe cleared away their dead soldiers. “As long as any of you jokers are still alive, you’re drinking at Pete’s courtesy of my new $57,389 tab. If you outlast my dough, you’re on your own. Otherwise, when the last of us steel mill geezers is gone, Pete gets whatever’s left.”

  “Now that’s my kind of good deed,” Habersham said.

  Lifting his beer to eye level, Jorgensen gave Trask a wink and said, “Here’s to good deeds—and to good luck, too!”

  Trask raised his glass.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he said with a smile. “For a little while longer, anyway.”

  THE CREEP

  BY WILLIAM E. WALLACE

  The Claymore apartment building where Susan Carnes lived was more than a century old and the 85-year-old “new” elevator it boasted seemed to work roughly three weeks of the year. Figuring out which weeks could be a challenge.

  Most of the time Susan ended up climbing the rickety uneven staircase, watching closely to avoid the runner of paper-thin carpet that humped up under her feet like a booby trap.

  She knew the dilapidated state of the building was why her rent came to only $250 a month. What she didn’t understand was why half the lights on the landings were always out, since the electricity they consumed couldn’t be that expensive. Whatever the reason, the resulting gloom always put Susan’s nerves on edge.

  They were on edge now, in fact.

  As she turned the blind corner on the fourth floor landing, a cockroach racing over the riser distracted her so much that she almost ran into the man who lived in the studio directly above hers. He loomed out of the shadows like a very substantial ghost.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you coming.”

  It was the first time she had encountered her neighbor since he moved in three weeks earlier. Her neighbor Mrs. Riley had mentioned him, but Mrs. Riley mentioned a lot of things. Susan tended to ignore most of them.

  “It’s my fault, miss,” he rasped, the rustle of his low voice like a breeze stirring the dry leaves in the Seventh Street cemetery six blocks away. It was a dead voice with the mechanical character of a recording that had been pieced together from different sounds, something like the machine that called out stops on the crosstown bus she rode to the hospital four days a week. Speaking seemed to pain the man and he coughed afterward, inclining his head and using the back of his left forearm to cover his mouth.

  Susan stared at his hand—slick and shiny as a piece of paraffin and almost the same color. It seemed undersized for such a tall, wide-shouldered man, but she realized almost immediately that it was short because he seemed to be missing the first joints of each finger: the ends, nails and all, looked as if they had melted off.

  She glanced up at his face. Only a strip of it showed between the turned-up collar of his military-issue raincoat and the lowered brim of his baseball cap. To her shock, she saw that it, too, had a melted, waxen look, like a dummy from the museum near the bus station. But the dummy would need a long time in the summer sun to get that sheen.

  The man’s haunted pale gray eyes were the only natural-looking part of his face.

  He nodded abruptly, squeezed next to the banister. The contents of the sack he carried clinked as he shifted it to give her more room. “Excuse me,” he said as he passed.

  His footsteps were heavy on the bare wood, as if his bag contained more than a batch of bottles. The droop to his shoulders, his slow trudge, the creak of the steps under his weight—they made it seem like he was lugging a lifetime of regret.

  Susan half turned as he disappeared into the darkness above. “Christ!” she whispered to herself, realizing she had been holding her breath during the encounter. The man’s scars—those she had seen, anyway—were frightening, like something from a horror movie.

  She flew down the remaining three flights of stairs with her heart in her throat and was still trembling when she reached the Clay
more’s front entry.

  ***

  “Have you seen that new guy who moved into the studio upstairs?” Sonny Jackson asked.

  Marcel didn’t answer. He was busy watching Bitsy, the girl with pink hair and a stud in her tongue who lived across the street. Bits was flaked out on her stoop, lounging back with her elbows on the riser behind her, knees up and legs wide apart. Her pose was exactly the same as Marcel’s. She stared at him coolly and Marcel wasn’t sure whether she was coming on to him or trying to show him up in front of his buddies.

  She was chewing gum and blew a small, tight bubble, then looked at him defiantly when it burst. Definitely a come-on sort of look.

  “Skank,” Marcel said with a disdainful smile, shaking his head. “See that, what she did with the gum? That cunt would pay me to pack her fudge.”

  Two of the five youths sitting with Marcel laughed. Bitsy could tell she was being dissed so she rose with as much dignity as a person with pink hair could muster, flipped Marcel off and went back into her apartment building.

  “What a boxer,” Marcel called after her. “Woof, woof, baby! Go chase a car!”

  “You screw her, you have to go to the vet, get a bath for fleas,” said Oscar One-eye, a 21-year-old whose squint made him look like he was perpetually winking.

  “Not fleas, man, worms,” said Roger Heath. Roger, four months out of juvie, had been Marcel’s number two until a few weeks ago when he said something that pissed Marcel off. He never figured out what it was but he’d been trying to work his way back into favor ever since.

  Marcel turned to Sonny. “What did you say, man?”

  Sonny was the only one in the group who hadn’t laughed at Marcel’s jibe or tried to top it by insulting Bits himself. Nobody expected him to: Sonny wasn’t the brightest button on the blazer, but his loyalty was unquestioned. He would stand shoulder to shoulder with Marcel against any other gang on the west side of town, and had done so several times.

  “I asked if you seen the new guy, the one upstairs who wears the hat and raincoat all the time,” Sonny said. “I got a good look at him when he came back from Gloria’s last night. He was all fucked up, man—drunk on his ass.”

  “You talking about G.I. Joe?” Marcel said.

  Sonny frowned. “You mean one a those little soldier dolls?”

  Marcel grinned and his entourage smiled with him, even though half of them had no idea what he was talking about. Didn’t do to look like you were as dumb as Sonny around Marcel; automatically put you on his loser list and Marcel wouldn’t trust you to peddle the chalk he scored from the beaners on 72nd Street, or do any of the other little jobs he pulled to make spending money.

  “Yeah, Sonny,” he said with a smirk. “Like the little soldier dolls. Somebody told me the guy was in Afghanistan. Got his ass cooked when the truck he was in ran over some rag-head bomb.”

  Sonny’s expression showed he was turning that information over in his head. Obviously took effort.

  “I guess that would explain it, then,” he said finally.

  “Explain what?”

  “Why the sonofabitch is so butt-ugly,” Sonny said. “He’s a real creep, man. Dude’s got more scars than that guy in the Elm Street movies.”

  “You mean Freddie Krueger?” Oscar asked. He hadn’t seen the new guy and was still trying to figure out why Sonny was talking about him.

  “Yeah,” Sonny said, smiling slightly. “The guy in those kids’ dreams. With the claw for a hand.”

  “It’s not a claw, Sonny,” Roger said, trying to work his way into the discussion. “It’s more like a set of knives or something.”

  “Yeah—Ginzus!” said Oscar. “They slice, they dice, they make millions of julienne fries—out of teenagers.”

  “Whatever,” Sonny said with a shrug. He wasn’t a stickler for details. “Anyways, the guy is as big as a horse, I swear to God. Like my uncle Stevie, only bigger.”

  The members of Marcel’s clique exchanged glances. If Sonny wasn’t just talking shit, this G.I. guy must be huge. Steve Riggins was the biggest man any of them had ever seen outside of a cage match on TV. He’d played football in high school and was all-state, a probable scholarship candidate, until he was expelled for selling the other players reefer. He worked as a longshoreman and looked like he could lift the business end of a Volkswagen bug without breaking a sweat.

  “You sure about that, Sonny?” Marcel asked. “Is he really bigger than Stevie?”

  “I ain’t lying, boss,” Sonny said. “He got scars like Freddie Krueger but he looks more like Frankenstein.”

  “You mean the monster,” said Luis Cardeña, the resident wise ass.

  “What?” Sonny looked confused.

  “The monster,” Cardeña said. Luis had once read a book. That made him a Mensa candidate compared to the other stoop boys.

  “Frankenstein was the scientist, some little skinny-assed dude,” he said. “The guy he stitched together from corpses was the monster.”

  Obviously, the book he’d read wasn’t the one by Mary Shelley.

  “What the fuck ever,” Marcel said with irritation. He decided he’d have to slap the shit out of Luis sometime—asshole was way too big for his britches.

  The other guys started telling each other stories about Stevie Riggins’s feats of strength, but Marcel was thinking about the new man living upstairs. A guy that big in the building could be trouble, he thought. There was only room for one alpha dog in the Claymore and Marcel was it. He would have to keep an eye out for this big-assed ex-soldier.

  ***

  “It was creepy, Millie,” Susan said as she loosely folded soiled bedding and placed it into the laundry cart. St. Bartholomew’s was short-handed and the two RNs had been asked to help with the domestic chores. “Seriously creepy. He scared the hell out of me, coming out of the dark like that.”

  Millie Howard, the orderly who worked with her in the hospital’s southwest wing, pulled the sheets and the rubber liner off the bed on the opposite side of the empty ward.

  “What was it that scared you?” She wadded the linen, put it in the cart and deposited the liner in a canvas bag. “Was it the way he looked or the way he suddenly appeared in front of you?”

  Susan thought a moment. “I dunno,” she said. “I think the way he showed up all of a sudden startled me to begin with. I didn’t see his face or hand until he spoke, so it couldn’t have been the way he looked, except for his size.”

  Millie paused, holding a sheet in her hands. “How big was he?”

  “Big. When I first saw him, he was at least a step below me but I still had to look up at him.”

  “That’s pretty tall,” she said. “What was it he said to you again?”

  “Something like, ‘Sorry, Miss.’” Susan tried to remember the incident as accurately as possible. “No, wait. That wasn’t it. He said, ‘My fault, Miss.’ That’s all. And ‘Excuse me’ as he passed.”

  Millie smiled. “At least he has manners. Did he sound like he was, you know, pissed off or anything?”

  “No, he just moved over and squeezed by. He even moved the bag he was carrying so that it hung over the banister, out of my way.” Now, in the brightly lit ward, talking to her friend about it, Susan wondered why she had found her neighbor so frightening.

  “Hm.”

  “I’m being silly, aren’t I?” Susan said, smiling. “Making a big deal out of nothing, really. He was perfectly nice to me. He was just big...and horribly scarred.”

  “Yeah,” Millie said, frowning. “I wonder what happened to him to make him look that way?”

  Susan bit her lip as she realized that thought had never entered her mind. She had been so caught up in her surprise and fear that she hadn’t felt any sympathy for the poor man. Working at St. Bart’s she saw lots of people who were in bad shape but she couldn’t remember ever seeing anybody who looked as bad as the man on the stairs. At least, not that was still alive.

  “I don’t know,” she said, wondering if she
was losing her ability to empathize with other people. She heard that could happen, working in an emergency ward all day with men and women who had been cut, stabbed, shot, whatever. “What is it you call those thick scars that make your skin look like wax? You know—excessive collagen formation in the corium?”

  Millie stripped another bed. “Keloid scars,” she said. “Sounds like burns. I worked at Northeast in the burn ward for a year and a half when I first got hired here at the hospital. There were several people in there with scars like the ones you’ve described. Most of them had already had a lot of skin grafts and reconstructive surgery to try and repair the damage. The scar tissue was thick and slick looking, like it was wet. It sort of looked like they were melting right in front of you.”

  Susan made a face. “Burns that bad must be terribly painful,” she said, belatedly feeling pity for the man on the stairs.

  “No kidding,” Millie said. “Most of the victims in northeast were taking painkillers. Morphine and other strong stuff.”

  ***

  “You’ve been self-medicating again, Mr. Baldocchi,” Dr. Clinton Smith said with a look of dismay.

  Stripped to the waist, Alan Baldocchi felt edgy and self-conscious. The waxy scars that covered his body from his knees to the crown of his head were hideous. Normally he did everything he could to conceal them, wearing his shirt collar buttoned to the top, the collar of his raincoat turned up and his cap tugged down to cover most of his head and face.

  When Smith examined him he had to strip away this disguise, revealing the pasty featureless mass underneath what had once been normal tissue. Baldocchi’s routine bitterness intensified on those occasions; he became even more snide and sarcastic than usual.

  “Did that show up in the lab work you keep ordering for me?” he asked the doctor. His voice was as rough as coarse sandpaper on a piece of old wood.

  “I didn’t need any tests,” Smith said. “I can smell it on you. Anybody who drinks that much, the alcohol starts to seep out of their pores.”