Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  “Take over, big shot. Got to point Percy to the pavement or my bladder’s going to explode.”

  He took another step toward the ladder. But Sawyer simply stared at the wheel and stayed put.

  “What’re we going to do, Gus?”

  “I know what I’m going to do. I just told you. Piss.”

  “Later, when we get back, what do we do?”

  “We call those nice young federal agents, lay it out for them.”

  Sawyer scanned the waters around them. A single open fisherman a mile away, its outriggers up, trolling for mahi-mahi.

  “Keep us on course. I’ll be right back.”

  “Which way?”

  “East is good,” he said. “And keep a buffer between us and anybody else. Fucking boaters out here, half of them are drunk, the other half are so goddamn rich they don’t care who they ram into.”

  Sawyer held them steady and watched Gus climb down the ladder to the aft deck. He tugged the throttles back a notch and took a deep breath of the ocean air. Squinted into the hard shimmer and pushed the yacht across the sweet blue waters.

  * * *

  He really did have to piss. Goddamn enlarged prostate. He should have the thing yanked out first chance he got.

  Dee Dee was watching cartoons, SpongeBob SquarePants, fucking creature at the bottom of the sea, singing, wiggling around, doing an Elvis imitation. All these other fish creatures bouncing around in utter adoration.

  She was sucking on the Bacardi, had it halfway done, some potato chips in a bowl on the table. Big dish of onion dip.

  “You’re going to lose your figure, girl, you keep eating like that.”

  “And what difference would it make?”

  “True,” Gus said, and ducked into the head and relieved himself.

  She was still lying there when he returned, her plaid skirt up to her thighs, grease stains on her white shirt, shoes off, one sock gone. Hair a mess. Dee Dee in meltdown.

  The last few years Gus had been watching her get stronger, all the exercise she did, and he suspected their sexual past had something to do with that. Girls got molested, some of them put on a ton of weight. Gus figured it was to put up a wall between them and any guy tried to touch them. A wall of blubber, and a good way to turn guys off. Never get screwed again. That was Gus’s understanding of the situation.

  Dee Dee’s approach was different, build a wall of muscles. Get so goddamn hard no man, no matter how tough he was, would be able to wrestle her to the ground. Or if he did, she could clamp herself shut, keep any cock from getting in. Gus was thinking, Hey, even worse than that, letting the guy get inside, then snap the vice clamps; Jesus, it made his rectum tighten thinking about it.

  “What you need is some fresh air, Dee, you’ll feel better, nice breeze in your hair, some sun.”

  “I’m watching this.”

  “You’re watching a fucking cartoon. That talking sponge would make anybody seasick.”

  “SpongeBob is cute, don’t you think? It’s a kids’ show, so he’s probably asexual. What do you think, Daddy? You think SpongeBob is sexually active? Does he have a male thingy?”

  “Come on, Dee, let’s get up.”

  She chugged some more rum, bubbled it right down. Which was fine by Gus, getting drunker, easier to handle, easier to get out the door before Mr. Eagle Scout got curious.

  Gus changed his tactic, using the deep voice, the actor’s voice he’d developed back in the day. It always worked magic with the women. A Barry White, cigarette-roughened golden voice, way deep in his throat.

  “Come on outside, sweet stuff. I got something you need to see.”

  She turned her head, gave him a sideways glance. Set the bottle on the table. Gus, the snake charmer, working his magic.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Spit it out, old man.”

  Nope. Wrong. Charm taking a holiday.

  He went over to her, stepping around the coffee table, checking out the windows to make sure Sawyer was doing as instructed, keeping them a long way off from other traffic. It looked clear out there. The boy cooperating. Gus wasn’t sure if the kid knew what he was about to do and was giving his silent sanction. Didn’t matter, really. But Gus was curious. Had he finally managed to convert the kid to Gus’s world view? Take it by the throat, rattle it till it coughed up what you wanted.

  He stood over Dee Dee and she stared up at him. Eyes red, lips having trouble holding any particular expression. What he didn’t want, he didn’t want to bruise her in any way.

  The FBI were very good at reading bruises. All that forensic shit they had. The way they nailed bad guys these days, could tell exactly what happened, like a video replay, step by step, piece it together from abrasions and hair samples and all that techno shit that bored him silly when it was on TV. He’d tried to watch those shows, never managed to make it more than five minutes. Science fiction it seemed like, a bunch of blinking hardware. But still, it put the fear of God into him, made him picky how he handled this.

  “Could you please stand up?”

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “You’re drunk, Dee Dee. You’re seasick. You need fresh air. I’m trying to help you.”

  “You think I’m a killer. You think I killed all those people.”

  “I think we’ll find you a really top attorney to make this all go away.”

  “Like you made the other thing go away.”

  “Yeah, like that. A good attorney, that’s what you need. And some fresh air.”

  He extended a hand to help her stand.

  “Leave me alone.”

  She chopped at his wrist. Not so drunk after all. It hurt like hell.

  And just like that, his impulse control went out the fucking porthole.

  He took her by the hair, short and black like his own, and yanked her to her feet and dragged her to the door and out onto the deck.

  She fought him, slashing at his arms, but he batted the blows away, trying to be gentle, not leave any bruises. Then he muscled her to the gunwale. Not as strong as she looked. Ripped muscles, but when it came down to it, when it came to fighting for her life, they were gym rat muscles, machine muscles, or maybe sex muscles, but what they weren’t was fight-till-the-death muscles. Not like Gus’s. Do-or-die muscles. Now-or-never muscles.

  He scanned the seas around them. Nobody anywhere. He backed her to the gunwale. He looked up to see if Sawyer had a view from up top. Maybe if the kid stepped to the back of the flybridge he could see, but not at the wheel.

  Dee Dee was grabbing at the hand clenching her hair, shaking her head against his grip, the ugly horror in her eyes. It was a look Gus had never been able to extract from her before in front of the cameras. A real actress could do that easy, but not Dee Dee. He’d tried everything, coaxing her every way he knew how, but she’d never been able to contort her face into an authentic look of terror. Even though it was in her arsenal, he could see that now. Her throat constricted, trying to scream but unable.

  He leaned back, got his feet set, then shouldered her over the side.

  Didn’t make a sound going over, landing on her back in the foam, a couple of sloppy strokes to keep her head up, trying to paddle out of the wake, big rolling wake back there, but the girl floundered. A Florida girl who didn’t swim. Disgraceful.

  Dee Dee had always been an indoor type. Not comfortable around the water, camping, hiking, all that shit. Which was probably Gus’s fault, the way he’d raised her.

  Gus watched her disappear into the Atlantic. Seeing her go down, he felt something shoot through his chest. A dark pang that was maybe a fraction of regret, a splash of anxiety, and a big dose of thrill.

  An interesting concoction. Gus made a note of how that all felt swirled together so he could explain it later to the idiot actors he had to work with, explaining to them how it felt to be human.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FRANK SHEFFIELD WAS DRIVING THE Taurus, Thorn navigating. It was midafternoon, hottest day of the summer s
o far. Humidity so thick you had to breathe twice to get one breath.

  As they drove, Sheffield filled him in on the statements given this morning to Rivlin and Vasquez, the two junior agents he’d drafted into action. Dee Dee, Gus, Sawyer, and Flynn, a couple of hours with each establishing whereabouts on the dates in question—the murder dates, the Sports Craze purchase dates.

  Dee Dee said she was home alone the night before, during the hours while Buddha was being murdered. No way to verify that, bellman was having a smoke, nobody saw her going up to her place. They’d have to check the security cams to see if they backed her up.

  Otherwise, she had a fuzzy memory, didn’t keep a calendar. Couldn’t be sure where she was on the other dates, maybe the gym, maybe out on the boat, maybe eating dinner somewhere, or asleep in her apartment, or having sex. She did that a lot, she said, her and Sawyer going at it. The girl bragging about her libido. She had witnesses for the sex if they wanted any.

  “Witnesses?”

  “Her and Sawyer, they do it with the blinds open. Neighbors watch.”

  “She said that?”

  “She did.”

  Thorn was silent, staring out his window.

  “What?”

  Thorn said, “It makes a certain fucked-up sense.”

  “Oh, does it?”

  “A girl gets her sex ed in front of a camera, she might be a little confused what was for show, what was real.”

  Sheffield looked over at Thorn and shook his head at this sad world. He drove in silence for a while, then let out a sigh and got back to the highlights of the morning’s interrogation.

  Gus Dollimore arrived with three poster boards. One for each of the last three months. Big as bullfight placards. A square for every day of the week. Each filled in with elaborate details of the show’s schedule, twenty-four seven. From the first day of principal photography through this morning. The actors, the upper-echelon crew, director of photography, first assistant director, cameraman. Everybody. Their schedules, their jobs, their performance, their comings and goings.

  “Guy’s seriously anal.”

  “Is it written in indelible ink?” Thorn asked.

  Just the opposite. It was done with a Sharpie on easy-erase plastic.

  “Best you can say is it tells us what Gus wants us to believe,” Frank said. “Which is he spends a lot of time on his yacht. It’s docked behind his condo. No dock master. He just walks out to the marina, cranks up, and goes.”

  “How convenient for him.”

  “Flynn spends his weekends cycling with a gang of bike freaks. They run from the Grove down to Key Largo and turn around and pedal back. Hundred miles, no sweat. The kid’s got stamina, I got to say. Twenty people in his bike club can alibi him. That’s like an every weekend thing. This one’s the oddball of the bunch. Lives in a studio apartment over near the Biltmore in the Gables. Shuns the party scene, unlike the rest of these folks.”

  “He’s an interesting kid,” Thorn said. “And Sawyer, what’s his story?”

  Sawyer had flown to Dallas last weekend. Arriving Saturday morning around noon. That night Michaela Stabler was speared three times. Starkville, Oklahoma, it was a three-, four-hour drive away.

  “That looks bad,” Thorn said.

  “Says it was for a meeting with some network guy from the west coast. The network guy stood him up. Whole trip was a waste. He flew back Monday early. Dee Dee picked him up at MIA. She corroborates that. Very selective memory. Remembered a traffic cop harassing her at the airport. Went on and on about that.”

  “And the Atlanta weekend?”

  “Claims he was scouting locations for the show over in Sanibel. Two nights on the road. He’s got receipts, can prove he was there. But hey, if he was trying to cover his ass, he could’ve registered, ducked out, driven straight through to Atlanta, slashed the nurse, returned in time to check out and drive back to Miami.”

  Traffic slowing around them. Thorn watched a motorcycle bomb past between lanes. A kid bent forward, nose to the handlebars, doing a hundred. Nobody in the cars around them gave the suicidal idiot a second look.

  “What about the manifests?”

  “All the airlines complied. We’re waiting on a couple, but I’m routing them through Rivlin and Vasquez. They’ll run everything into the mainframe, search for names of anyone on the cast and crew of Miami Ops.”

  “And this guy we’re going to see? The rat catcher? He on the list?”

  “Him too. But, hey, no reason to fly under your real name. Coming up with false ID in South Florida, it’s like buying a pound of bacon.”

  Fifteen minutes later they pulled into an industrial park two blocks south of the Opa-locka Airport. The place was full of businesses selling airplane parts, repair shops, import-export offices, storage depots, warehouses full of antique cars, and outfits that leased business jets. Bland storefronts doing big-time commerce.

  “On the right, that shop in the back.”

  Miami Humane Wildlife Removal was stenciled over the door of a block building painted in an adobe brown. Out front was a green Ford pickup with orange tiger stripes running down the sides. Wire cages piled high in the bed of the truck, cables and nets.

  Frank had called Matheson to schedule a meet, and the rat catcher was waiting for them in his office. Desktop bare, shelves empty as though he’d just moved in or was about to move out. The only sign of activity was a small laptop computer on a stand in one corner of the room, its screen saver running through a series of photographs of naked, big-breasted women.

  On the walls he’d hung a few snapshots of his professional exploits, a series of color prints showing Jeff holding up an assortment of on-the-job creatures. The usual python pics. Monitor lizards, gators with their snouts duct-taped shut. Critters he’d no doubt removed from swimming pools and patios out in the western side of town in those sprawling neighborhoods chewing away at the Everglades. There was a feral pig, an indigo snake, a fox, several iguanas.

  But the one Thorn was drawn to, the one he walked over to see before anyone said hello, was a black-and-white of Matheson standing in the middle of an empty warehouse circled by thousands and thousands of flying bats.

  It looked as if he’d put the camera on a table and set the self-timer. The flash caught him in the midst of a thick swarm, bats zipping through his spread legs, dodging above and below his outstretched arms, skimming past his face, his ears. The membranes of their wings tickling inches from his nose. Must have been just after sunset because a few thousand more bats hadn’t awakened yet and were still hanging behind him in the rafters of that big empty space.

  In the photo Jeff wore some kind of protective suit, but he’d taken off his hood for the photo. Given the fact that he was ankle deep in guano and standing in the middle of a whirlwind of sharp-toothed blind mammals that had a fair likelihood of being rabid, the look on his face was eerily unruffled. Like a symphony conductor waiting tolerantly for his rambunctious orchestra to finish warming up before he lifted his baton.

  “I got a tribe of rats living at my place on the Key,” Frank said to Matheson. “They’re fine, I got no objections to them. Make little beds out of grass and seaweed tucked in the corners of the attic, come and go, it’s all cool. Only time I ever had a problem was a neighbor put out poison and all his rats came to my place to die. Crawled into the walls, under the floorboards, light fixtures, curled up and rotted. Smelled so bad I had to move out for two weeks, shut the place down for a month. I found a few carcasses, but there was no way to get rid of all of them.

  “I called a guy like you, Jeff, a professional critter catcher. He wanted thirty-nine bucks a rat. Dead or alive. Thirty-nine bucks. I said no thanks and went and had a talk with my neighbor. Next time you put out rat poison, call me first, I told the guy. I’ll stand guard at my ventilation grills, send them back so they can die at your place. A person should take responsibility for the things he kills. It’s just common courtesy. Don’t you agree?”

  “Okay, I
confess,” Jeff said. He held out his hands for the cuffs. “I’m guilty, I did it. Just electrocute me now before I kill again.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Frank, “that takes away all the fun. Give us a chance to prove it first.”

  “The Zentai Killer,” Jeff said. “That’s who I am, right?”

  “If you say so.” Frank moseyed around the office, taking a look at a few of the naked women, appearing and disappearing on the computer screen. Then coming over to stand by Thorn and look at the bat warehouse.

  “None of them bumped you,” Thorn said. “The bats, not even a nick?”

  “Whatever you say, Officer,” Jeff said. “I want to assist any way I can.”

  “Man, this is one tricky customer.” Frank took his jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair. Letting Jeff get a look at his handgun, and sending the kid a message. Going to stay a while.

  “You been taking rats out of the Moss house for months. Is that right?”

  “Oh, stop the charade,” Jeff said. “You’re not here to talk about rats. I’ve still got three clients to see before my day is over. Some of us have to make an honest living. So let’s do this. What’ve you got on me?”

  The words were petulant, but the tone was utterly disengaged. Jeff had lowered his hands and was sitting erect in the chair, forearms on the desk, hands clasped. The poise of a man who made his living lulling dangerous creatures into dropping their guard.

  While Frank was checking out some of the photos, Thorn took a turn.

  “How’re things working between you and Flynn Moss these days?”

  Matheson’s head ticked a quarter inch to the right as if he’d caught the faint scratch of claws inside his walls. A move so subtle that if Thorn hadn’t been watching intently, he would have missed it. This guy had been doing his yoga and meditation and he’d found his still center a few inches below his navel. Or however the hell he managed to be so detached. But just a mention of Flynn’s name made him twitch.

  “Flynn Moss and I are old friends.”

  “Thorn?” Frank moved to his side, but Thorn went on.