by K. T. Tomb
It’s too bad Erin will never come out and do this with me. It’s too bad she can’t enjoy this the way I do. It doesn’t matter how many times I ask, either. It doesn’t make a whole lotta sense to me. She loves the dog. She loves camping and fishing. She loves eating the stupid ducks, so why won’t she come do this with me? It’s magic out there, that’s what it is. Maybe I’ll just buy a place out here, and eventually she’ll figure it out.
Chapter Twelve
Erin put on her favorite nightie and lay in bed.
It was one of her favorites, but she knew that it was not one of Mike’s. Mike loved underwires and corsets and loved her tits pushed up high, and her ass hanging out. She always felt cheap in that kind of lingerie. She preferred something silky-soft, flowing and that, when it touched her skin, would cling. It wasn’t that she felt out of shape, or even that she was out of shape—she knew she looked good and she knew he loved whatever it was when she wore it. She did not know why, especially recently, she just hadn’t had any sex drive. Tonight, though, she couldn’t help it. She wanted to feel sexy, feel wanted, feel needed. She wanted to know that she still had it. She huffed and sighed, knowing that she was drunk. She had more wine that night than she normally did.
Frustrated, she huffed again. She couldn’t remember the last time that she and her husband were intimate. She missed it; she missed him and her frustration was twofold. Physically she was frustrated. Mentally, too—how could she tell her husband that he wasn’t doing what she needed him to get done? What kind of a fight would that cause? She almost didn’t care about a fight—maybe they would finally talk to each other about something important. She didn’t know.
She looked at the napkin in her hand—she didn’t remember bringing it to bed. She dialed the number. The phone rang, and rang, and rang.
Chapter Thirteen
We were halfway through dinner.
Things were going well. I had successfully managed to avoid almost all the usual small talk. She told me almost nothing about her personal life. It was usually better that way. When I didn’t make an attachment, and they didn’t make an attachment; everything was easier. There was a lesser chance of getting any wires crossed, so to speak.
Then my phone rang. I looked down. The call was coming from an unknown number. That usually meant that it was from a client; either a current one or a new prospect. As I was in thought, the phone was still ringing, so I declined the call and sent it to voicemail. It could wait, and I was on vacation. The area code was one I knew, though, and one I knew well. It was the same area code as my one and only regular client. Who constantly referred her friends to me. It was a call I should have taken, in hindsight, but I was not worried about it. I slipped the phone back into my pocket and hoped Sara had not noticed. I always carried that phone with me—I was not dumb enough to keep my client contacts in the same phone as my personal one. Instead, I carried everything on a SIM card that I periodically changed in and out of burner phones. But the burner always went with me. One of the cardinal rules I set with every single client, every single time we met, was that if anything ever happened where they were compromised, I was to be alerted. Immediately. I had contingency plans to ensure I did not go to jail, but it was important that if I needed to put one in motion, I had the right amount of time.
Apparently, I was not as subtle as I thought I was, because when I looked up, I could see the fear and desperation on Sara’s face. I could tell immediately that she was worried this night would end in a way she had not anticipated. And I could see she was anticipating quite a bit.
“Was that important?” Sara asked.
“Nobody I know,” I replied as I took another bite of my food. It really was divine. I had known that the food in New Orleans was good, but it was so much more gratifying to finally be experiencing it in person. The spices brought out the flavors in the seafood that I would never have thought possible. Food was a sensual experience for me. I lost myself in the smell, the texture, the atmosphere that the restaurant designers created specifically to enhance the dining experience. I tried to savor every bite. Food and wine were my escape. Whereas most men enjoyed sexual experiences, it was harder for me to find true satisfaction in sex because it was what I did for a living. Day in and day out. I got tired of it sometimes, and there weren’t a whole lot of new experiences available to me—and the ones that were, well, they were not necessarily experiences I would relish.
Food, on the other hand, was always available, and it could always be a new experience. So when it came to what got me going, food was always a good place to start. That’s why I was so happy she took me to that place. And as much as I could, I would repay her. When the time came.
The waiter noticed that we were mostly done with our course.
“Can I get the monsieur and madam anything else?” he asked in a heavy accent.
She looked at me expectantly across the table. Her eyes told me that she was ready to leave and she was clearly expecting me to cut the meal short.
“What do you have for dessert?” I asked.
I knew that the anticipation was killing Sara, but I had to keep her wanting more. I could almost feel her heat from across the table. It was a heat I was very much looking forward to feeling. And I wanted to keep her on the edge; I wanted to keep her waiting, watching, letting her burn, and the slower the burn, the hotter the flame, and the better job I did with setting the burn, the better it would be, later. Or at least that was how it would seem to her. In this case, I knew that’s how it would be for me.
“We have a large selection,” he said. “But I would recommend the King Cake, which I’m sure you’ve already had plenty of since you’ve arrived in town, or the chocolate covered strawberries,” he said with a knowing smile. “Very sweet,” he added with a wink in her direction.
I could tell it would almost kill her to sit back and wait out dessert. So I told the waiter to bring us one of each. The King Cake arrived, brilliant in its colors, but we didn’t even touch it; the strawberries were that perfect.
Chapter Fourteen
As Mike pulled into his driveway, he couldn’t help but heave a sigh of relief.
Home sweet home, he thought to himself.
He couldn’t wait to see his wife. He knew that she would probably listen with less than half her ability to do so as he recounted the weekend of hunting, but it didn’t matter to him. He loved talking to her about his adventures. It was one of his favorite things to do. After five years of marriage, he was looking forward to having kids and eventually teaching them how to live off the land too; essentially showing his kids—their kids—how to hunt and camp and be self-sufficient. He had already started unloading the truck when he got an eerie feeling.
“Where’s Erin?” he said out loud to himself. “She typically comes out and pretends to fuss about where I want to put my crap.” It was one of the things he loved best about her—the fuss she would make when he got home. He knew it was because she was feeling slightly left out, maybe even a little neglected because this was the one weekend she knew she did not have a standing invite to.
For Christ’s sake, she’s got four-hundred-dollar waders, a three-hundred-dollar hunting coat and all the layers necessary to go with me every other time. And she has the option of coming with me every time, Mike thought to himself, trying not to get too irritated. He always got irritated when he thought about that. Maybe if she made more of an effort to do this kind of a thing with me, I would make more of an effort to do the crap she wants to do like going downtown into the city to buy crap she didn’t want or need… And that would have made him shiver, if things did not already seem so off.
He decided to leave the dog in his crate a moment longer. They’d driven straight through the night and the canine was beginning to whine, letting Mike know that he was both hungry and tired and a little upset that he did not get to ride in the front of the truck, but Mike couldn’t stop thinking that Erin should be awake by then. The garage door alone opening up usu
ally sent her flying out of the house and into his arms. He loved that first hug. She usually did not say a word to him—after this weekend at least—it was always just a hug that clearly said, “I miss you.” But she was nowhere to be seen.
Maybe she’s making lunch, music blarin’ and she didn’t hear the door go up. I hope it’s something hot.
He opened the garage door and saw her car wasn’t parked in its spot.
That’s weird—where the hell is she? He checked his phone, looking for texts, but there was nothing. She would normally let him know if she’d been out late, which meant that she had gotten incredibly drunk the night before.
He opened the garage door and walked into the kitchen. No one was there, and the lights were all off.
What the hell? She clearly hasn’t been home yet today. Where did she go?
Inexplicably, he was filled with overwhelming foreboding as he walked up the stairs and into their bedroom. The door was ajar and Mike pushed it open, slowly revealing the gruesome scene lying before him on the king-sized bed. He fell to his knees as he witnessed a scene from his worst nightmare. It was Erin, in her favorite nightie, posed on the bed looking extremely peaceful, except for the bullet wound in her chest. Blood was soaking through the creamy-gold Egyptian cotton sheets that she had loved so much. When they had received those sheets as a wedding present, part of the deal was that Mike would clip his toenails to keep from ruining them. His father-in-law never did, and their sheets were ruined. The joke Mike had made, that had stuck, had been that he and Erin slept in King Tut’s bed. He rushed over to her; hoping, praying that there was something he could do. He fell to his knees, checking for a pulse, but he knew immediately that it was futile. Erin’s skin was already cool to the touch.
He broke down crying and before he could begin to register what had really happened there, he called the police. The dispatcher told him that an officer would be there shortly, but by then Mike wasn’t even listening anymore. He knelt beside her, gently kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips as he did every night they went to sleep together. He put his large, calloused hands against her face, palms gently caressing her cheeks, and waited for the police to show up.
***
When the officers arrived at the scene, they were greeted by the sound and smell of a wet, clearly dissatisfied Labrador Retriever. He was in a travel-kennel in the back of an older Chevy pick-up truck. His tail beat a steady thwack-thunk thwack-thunk thwack-thunk against the inside of his kennel, letting the officers know he was friendly, yet his whining told them they were in the right place.
The officers turned to one another, and the plain-clothes said to his just-promoted-to-detective partner Officer Vineterri,
“Even the dog knows something terrible happened here.”
“He could just be tired? I mean… I’ve seen what a three or four-day hunting trip can do to a dog… he probably just wants to get inside and mess up the master bed?”
The plainclothes just looked at his partner and shook his head. Not a chance, he thought to himself silently.
“Sir,” Vineterri said to Mike, whom they found kneeling at the bedside of his wife, even though it seemed that the man had showered, and waited a moment.
“Sir?” he asked again. “Sir, I know this is difficult…”
“You have no damn idea what this is like,” Mike said in a dangerously calm voice, “so don’t pretend to, please.”
“You’re right sir, I don’t… I don’t even know what I would do in your situation. But we need to get you down to the station. Sir,” the cop added quickly, seeing thunderclouds building behind the distressed husband’s eyes.
He was in his mid-twenties and new to the force, having only been a sworn officer for a few months. It was the end of his shift when he got the call to respond to the homicide. Shortly after it had come in, the police department had received a second such call. It wasn’t unusual to receive multiple homicide reports in the L.A. area. What had been the strange thing was that both incidents had occurred in the same area. The two men that had called them in were also friends, both the victims had been friends, and both women had been killed in a similar way. The detective on the case wanted to talk to the husbands right away, and had pulled a favor to have another detective—Detective Gordon—to accompany the Vineterri to this scene. He immediately pointed out how strange it was that the husband here was clean, and how could Mike have had the time to shower before the officers got there. Things had started off poorly for this guy—he just got home from a hunting trip, probably frozen to the bone, and just wanted to get clean. And when that was done, he probably did not want to leave his wife’s side, if he did not have to.
“Well,” Mike said his voice still dangerously calm, “I’m not going anywhere. My wife is dead. My dog has nowhere to go. I can’t leave him here alone in the house with the bedroom like that. He won’t understand what happened, and he’ll panic with me gone. He needs a bath to get the swamp water off him too. We hunted some brackish backwaters near the coast, so I have to get the salt off him. I need to rinse off my truck so the salt don’t ruin the paint, and then I need to clean my gun. Not to mention my wife is dead,” he added, “and your genius detective over there would like to think I had something to do with it. You ever see a dead person before? Well, I can’t say I have either. What I have seen, though, is a lot of dead elk. Bigger than a person, sure, and different in a lot more ways as well. But let me tell you something about elk. If you’re ever lucky enough to shoot one, there’s no guarantee it goes down right where you hit it. Sometimes, the elk runs, and sometimes, the hunter doesn’t find it. When that elk goes down, it starts to cool off. My wife, when I got home, was cool to the touch. That means this happened sometime last night. When I was in the truck. I can show you a receipt from midnight, when I stopped atta truck stop to get some food. So, respectfully, of course, y’all can go fuck yerselves if you think I had somethin' t’do wi’ this.”
The policeman could tell the man was on the edge of an abyss.
“Sir, I completely understand that you’re going through something unimaginable here. Why don’t we stop and attend to the dog for a minute? By the way, what’s his name? He’s a beautiful retriever,” the cop said.
“His name is Duke. Five and a half years old. He was an… an engagement gift… From Erin…” Mike trailed off, barely able to contain the grief in his voice.
“Let’s stop and take Duke to a groomer. They’ll give him a bath, take care of him, give him some pampering? We understand you just got home, but the Detective who will actually be working this case,” and he shot the idiot he was forced to bring with a look that said, ‘really, you should go fuck yourself’, “needs to talk to you briefly, let you know the next steps, that kind of stuff. Would that be okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” Mike said. “And just so I know, what do you mean when you say Detective Jackass over there isn’t working this case?”
“Detective Gordon,” the officer said, wishing he could also refer to him as Detective Jackass, “is here helping out the guy who will actually work your case. The other detective is currently at another crime scene. That’s all I can say about that right now, and I’m sorry for that,” the officer said. And he sincerely meant it.
“I suppose the truck can wait. So can the gun. Do Duke and I ride in the truck or…?”
“You’re not under arrest,” the officer told him as gently as he could. “Duke can ride in the kennel. Where do you normally take him for grooming?”
“I don’t get my dog groomed,” Mike said, hinting at the core of steel that every man should have inside him, “but I know a place that I can take him to.”
“Lead on. Once we drop him off, you can follow me down to the station.”
Mike got into his truck and turned the ignition. He placed his head on the steering wheel for a moment. For the first time in a long time, other than after he shot an animal, he made the sign of the cross and said a quick prayer. He prayed for his wife’s
soul to be admitted to heaven for the way she left the world. He prayed for strength to get through whatever there was to come and he prayed for the strength to recover, eventually. And for now, he prayed for the soul of the person that did this to his beautiful wife. Because if Mike found that son-of-a-bitch first, there wouldn’t be a body left to find. And Mike was trying—and failing—to tell himself that going after the killer would be wrong. Then he raised his head, pulled out of the driveway, and headed for the local groomer, Doggy Styles. Whenever he and his wife would head back east to Wisconsin, they would always take Duke there. They had some shampoo that for about three days would stop Duke’s shedding. It was only three days, but it was three days Mike did not have to listen to his in-laws complain about the hair on the couch. He had insisted on taking Duke there the first time—he remembered not even being able to believe the balls on the owner of the place. Erin did not find the name of the groomer that funny, but after they got to know the people there, they loved it.
Mike and Officer Vineterri then made their way to the station. They pulled into the parking lot, and Vineterri told him that he would meet him inside, as soon as he had parked the cruiser.
Mike walked through the precinct door and received the second biggest shock of the day. Rick, Sheila’s husband, was there too. Rick walked over to Mike and immediately threw his arms around Mike. Mike was completely taken aback—there was no way Rick already knew what happened, which meant there was another reason he was there.
“What are you doing here?” Rick asked.
“Long story—not sure I’m ready to talk about it. You? I thought you’d be at home with Sheila, relaxing after our hunt.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
Something in Rick’s voice told Mike immediately that everything was not okay with his friend.
