Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  He lied to me about Andy and about Jimmy and about everything every day since. He held me, and he watched me cry, and he told me that he loved me. I could have married him and had children with him—the man who murdered my own husband.

  The unfolding reality engulfed her like a series of thundering waves, each more powerful than the last, pounding her and tossing her about like flotsam and depositing her exhausted body at last on the cold kitchen floor. Kathryn drew a deep breath and prepared to weep, prepared to summon forth the keener’s wail that comes from the blackest corner of the soul.

  But before she could make a sound, the doorbell rang.

  It was four o’clock.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Kathryn tried to struggle to her feet, but a wall of nausea slammed her down again. She forced herself up, gagging, and tried to straighten herself as best she could. Her legs would not support her the entire distance to the door; she stumbled to the sofa and collapsed. She quickly wiped her eyes and waited, staring silently at the door.

  The doorbell rang a third time.

  What do I say? What do I do?

  The man she invited to her house a hundred times before was a faithful and trusted friend, a man she had known and loved for three decades. But that man was dead now, gone forever, destroyed just minutes ago by a handful of words scribbled in a soldier’s diary. The man outside the door was a man she had never seen before, a liar and a murderer, a monster capable of unspeakable evil. Was she supposed to greet him with a kiss? Should she sit with him and hold his hand, the same hand that squeezed the trigger and casually put an end to her husband’s life? Should she chat with him about the future—about their future—as though he had not single-handedly engineered the destruction of Kathryn’s entire world?

  A moment later she heard the sound of a key fumbling in the lock. The door swings slowly open.

  “Didn’t you hear the bell?” Peter said.

  Kathryn said nothing. It was all she could do to keep her composure, to keep from vomiting or screaming or gasping for air. She felt like a child standing petrified in a dark room, overwhelmed by a sense of approaching evil. No, it was more than that.

  She felt like a seven-year-old girl helplessly trapped in a ’57 Chevy.

  Peter stepped closer and looked at her—at the pallor of her face, the emptiness of her gaze, and the rigidity of her posture. He whistled softly.

  “Hey,” he said. “Who died?”

  Nick watched the sheriff enter the house from a block away where he carefully hid his car behind a pair of rusting construction Dumpsters. His ’64 Dodge had become something of a landmark in Rayford, and this was one time he couldn’t afford to be recognized. He waited several minutes before approaching on foot, sticking close to trees and shrubbery in case he had to make a last-minute dive for cover. He would only need a few minutes to raise the hood of the sheriff’s car, take care of business, and be on his way. Five minutes had already elapsed. If Kathryn managed to keep the sheriff occupied for even half of the thirty minutes he asked for, he would still have time to spare.

  The driveway rose sharply toward the house, and the black-and-white Crown Victoria was parked to the right of Kathryn’s car. He approached almost casually from behind—but twenty yards away he suddenly recognized a second figure in the car, a hulking silhouette on the passenger side.

  Nick took several quick steps back, afraid that the deputy might have already spotted his legs in the rearview mirror—but there was no sign of motion or recognition from the car.

  Nick glanced at the patrol car, then at the house—then at his watch.

  “I’m sorry I kicked your Bug Man friend, if that’s what this is all about.” Peter searched in vain for the cause of Kathryn’s gloom. “But he had it coming.”

  By sheer force of will Kathryn raised her eyes and looked at a face she had never seen before. For the first time she noticed the barracudalike jut of his jaw, the awkward spacing of his empty gray eyes, the spatter of cratered pockmarks on his mottled skin, and the wiry coarseness of his sallow hair. It was evil. It was all evil. Why had she never seen it before?

  “I know you must be upset about the shooting,” he ventured. “You know, Dr. What’s-his-name.”

  “Teddy,” she managed a trembling whisper. “His name was Teddy.”

  “Whatever. That must have been tough for you. Sorry you had to see that.”

  Kathryn looked into his hollow, soulless eyes.

  “Why, Peter? Why did anyone have to die?”

  “It’s a shame.” He shook his head. “Sometimes it comes to that.”

  Kathryn stared at him. “What’s it like? To kill a man, I mean.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “But I want to know. Do you look at his face, or do you avoid his eyes so you won’t hesitate to pull the trigger? Do you try to think of him as just a target—like one of those big silhouettes at the firing range—or do you think about where he came from, who might love him, who he might be leaving behind?”

  He looked at her. “Boy, you’re in a mood today.”

  “I want to know,” she repeated, holding back her tears.

  “There’s no time to think. In my line of work, sometimes you have to make a split-second decision. There’s no time to think about things like that.”

  “I’m not talking about your line of work—I’m talking about murder. What do you think about when there is time? What do you think about when you know you’re going to kill someone?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t suppose a murderer thinks about any of those things.”

  “Sometimes killing is necessary,” she said. “Sometimes it’s your duty. You can always tell yourself later it was my job, I had to do it, he deserved to die. But what does a murderer think later? What does he tell himself? How does he explain it all away?”

  A pause. “I suppose he tells himself he had to do it too.”

  “He had to do it,” she repeated. “But of course he didn’t have to. He chose to. It was just his selfish, stupid, cowardly way of trying to fix things—trying to make things go his way.”

  “I … I guess so …”

  “Do you suppose a murderer thinks of himself as a good person who just had to do a bad thing? Because that’s a lie, you know. But maybe it doesn’t matter—maybe he’s gotten so good at lying to himself that he can’t tell the lies from the truth anymore.”

  He shifted uneasily. “How should I know?”

  She stared into his eyes. “Don’t you think about these things, Peter? I do. I think about them all the time.”

  “How would you guys like to make ten bucks?” Nick smiled at the three bored youngsters draped across a buckling swing set.

  “You guys?” the first boy mocked. “Where you from, mister?”

  Nick eyed him. “I’m from a place where the kids have got guts.”

  “What do we gotta do?” the second boy asked indignantly.

  “You boys know Beanie? Beanie, the deputy sheriff?”

  All three nodded.

  “He’s a friend of mine, and I want to play a little joke on him. He’s sitting right over there in the squad car, see him? The sheriff told him to stay in the car, and I want to sneak up and surprise him. All you have to do is distract him—keep him occupied for, let’s say, twenty minutes.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “How should I know? Talk to him, tell him some jokes, show him your baseball cards. What am I paying you for? You think of something. But remember—twenty minutes.”

  The third boy cocked his head to one side. “Each. Ten bucks each.”

  “Ten bucks even,” Nick replied, “and I’ll give each of you a scorpion the size of your hand.”

  The three boys raced to Beanie’s window.

  “Hey, Beanie!” the first called out. The deputy turned to them, displaying a broad, white swatch of gauze plastered across the center of his face.

  “Wow!” the second boy stopped. “What happe
ned to your nose?”

  “I got hit,” Beanie sulked. “Go ’way.”

  “Is it broke?”

  “Nope.” Beanie brightened a bit. “Agnes says my head’s too hard. But it sure did bleed! You shoulda seen it.”

  “You got two black eyes,” the third boy joined in. “Cool!”

  Nick swung to the left and approached the car obliquely, hoping to remain in Beanie’s blind spot. When he reached the tail of Kathryn’s car he ducked down and crawled forward along the left side, then right across the front of the car, staying low and tight against the bumper and grill. At the right front corner he paused, then dropped to the ground and rolled across the gap between the two cars, stopping on his back directly in front of the Crown Victoria.

  He heard a sound. He glanced to the right to see one of the boys smiling and watching him. Nick jabbed at his wristwatch and then gestured angrily for the boy to move away. The boy shook his head, held up both hands and flashed the number “twenty.”

  Twenty, Nick nodded furiously, and I’ll put the scorpion in your bed.

  Peter leaned back and stretched his arms across the top of the sofa.

  “This is all about Jimmy, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” Kathryn could feel his eyes on the back of her head, and it made the hair stand up on her neck.

  “I tried to warn you. You got your hopes up. You thought you could prove that Jim was the victim of some sinister plot, so you hired some fancy Bug Man—but it wasn’t as easy as you thought.”

  “No,” she whispered. “It turned out to be more complicated than I ever imagined.”

  “I should have stepped in. I asked the doc not to take your money, but he wouldn’t listen. I knew he was the wrong sort from the beginning. I know it’s hard when you trust someone and they let you down.”

  She turned and stared at him. “You have no idea.”

  “So you’ve had enough? You’re willing to listen to reason now?”

  Kathryn turned her head to one side and studied him thoughtfully.

  “People commit suicide in different ways, don’t they, Peter? Some people put a gun to their head and pull the trigger, and it’s over in an instant. But others hang themselves, and I imagine that takes quite a bit longer. Some people poison themselves or even starve themselves, and then it could take weeks or months to die. But it’s all still suicide, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” the sheriff shrugged.

  “You can help someone commit suicide, can’t you? What do they call it—’doctor-assisted’ suicide? You aren’t actually killing anyone, they can’t convict you of anything, you’re only assisting—but you still make the suicide possible. You don’t pull the trigger, but you buy the gun. You don’t make him take the poison, but you hand him the pills. There must be a thousand ways to help kill a man, and it’s all still suicide.”

  The sheriff said nothing.

  “It gets confusing, doesn’t it, Peter—the question of who’s to blame, I mean? One man ties the noose, another puts the rope around his neck, and someone else kicks the chair away. Who did the actual killing? It isn’t necessarily the one who took the final step, you know—sometimes it’s the one who was thinking the clearest or the one who had the most malice in his heart. It’s strange, isn’t it? You drive a man to depression, you take away all of his hopes and dreams, and then you hand him a gun and he pulls the trigger. It’s suicide. But who really killed him?”

  The sheriff glanced at his watch. So did Kathryn.

  “You were right, Peter. I can see now that you were right all along. Jimmy was responsible for taking his own life—but I think someone helped him. I think someone handed him the gun. And I know who did it too.”

  She stared hard into the depths of the thick, gray ice.

  “I did it,” she said. “I killed Jimmy when I didn’t love him enough to see how much he was hurting.”

  Kathryn studied Peter’s eyes, praying for some telltale shift in the ice, some glimmer of guilt or remorse, some flickering recognition of the utter damnation of his own soul. But the ice remained immovable, impassable, and that’s when Kathryn knew beyond all doubt that the soul of Peter St. Clair was beyond redemption.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, kiddo. You didn’t know.”

  A swell of revulsion and utter contempt heaved up from her stomach into her throat and she struggled to hold back the rage that surged up within her.

  “I’ve had enough,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’m ready to listen to reason now. I want you to give me a reason, Peter, just one reason …”

  Kathryn rose from the sofa. “I want you to tell me the reason you murdered my husband.”

  Nick lay with his head directly underneath the radiator of the Crown Victoria. It was darker than he had hoped. This would be a lot easier if he could simply raise the hood, but that was hardly something the deputy would consent to. He pulled a white handkerchief from his shirt pocket and spread it open on the ground by his right ear. He fumbled through his pockets for a pair of light-tension forceps, then squeezed his left forearm up into the narrow gap between the radiator and grill. He felt delicately along the surface of the radiator until his fingers arrived at the first tiny lump stubbornly wedged between the fragile metal fins. Then he brought his right hand up to the same location and maneuvered the forceps into position, carefully plucking out the specimen and dropping it onto the handkerchief to his right. He repeated the process again and again, as quickly as possible, until he could feel no more telltale projections at all.

  “Show us your gun, Beanie!” one of the boys entreated.

  “Yeah!” another chimed in. “Show us your gun!”

  Beanie shook his head sadly. “Unca Pete took it. Says he gotta clean it real good. You got to have a clean gun.”

  Nick smiled. It didn’t take the sheriff long to figure out the reason for his assault on Beanie at the picnic table. By now the Beretta was clean as a whistle—or gone entirely, and with it any chance of matching the blood in the barrel to Teddy’s. “I’m not a fool, Doc,” the sheriff had warned him.

  No, Sheriff, I’ve got to hand it to you—you’re no fool.

  He rolled onto his right side and carefully pulled the dotted handkerchief up close. He quickly discarded a variety of Lepidoptera and various scarabaeid beetles—the moths and June bugs that abound in the thick summer skies, and the occasional honeybee that had drifted across the road on its way to gather pollen. All that remained on the handkerchief was a tiny pile of Diptera, an assortment of flies of various colors and sizes.

  From his left pants pocket Nick removed a photographer’s loupe. He raised his glasses and pressed the tiny magnifier tight against his right eye, then one by one began to pluck up the remains of each insect and examine it like a jeweler appraising a precious stone.

  “Who hit you anyway?” one of the boys asked Beanie, staring at the white bandage plastered across his face.

  “I dunno. A doctor. A doctor hit me.”

  “A doctor? Why would a doctor hit you?”

  “I dunno,” Beanie repeated irritably. “But he hit me—hard. And then he jumped on me, and he was gonna hit me again, but Unca Pete stopped him.”

  “What did he look like, this doctor that hit you?”

  Beanie scrunched up his face and thought long and hard. “He didn’t have no eyes.”

  “No eyes?” one of the boys laughed. “He was a blind doctor?”

  “I mean glasses.” Beanie scowled at them. “Big, funny glasses.”

  The three boys looked at each other.

  Large body, red eyes, gray-checkered abdomen—it’s a sarcophagid.

  Nick tossed it aside.

  Broad head, flattened body, multicolored eyes—just a big old horse fly.

  He quickly glanced at his watch—only five minutes left. He pulled his glasses back down and began to rapidly sort through the remaining specimens—the metallic green and blue calliphori
ds here, the common Muscidae over there—soon only two specimens remained and they appeared to be identical. He seized the most intact specimen with his forceps and held it up to the loupe.

  Greenish blue with purple reflections. The lower squamae are brown, the posterior margins of the second and third abdominal segments are jet black—and it has anterior spiracles!

  He rotated it forward and searched the bulbous, dome-shaped head for the final indicator. Sure enough, the upper eye facets were greatly enlarged. It was a Chrysomya megacephala—the same species that Noah identified from the puparium left by the fly on Jim McAllister’s body. Jim McAllister was in southern Georgia or Florida just over a week ago—and so was this car.

  Means, motive, and opportunity, Sheriff. Three strikes and you’re out.

  Nick was startled by the sound of a door closing and the scatter of children’s feet. He quickly placed the two megacephalae in the center of the handkerchief, folded it carefully, and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. He reached up for the bumper and began to wriggle out from under the car when a pair of massive hands grabbed on to his belt and shirt and jerked upward. His body rose from the ground as if weightless. His forehead smashed against the bottom of the grill, stunning him, but the impact barely even slowed his upward ascent. He continued to rise up into the searing, blinding sun—and then an instant later came crashing back down onto the hood of the car, knocking the wind from his lungs. He felt the two massive hands release him for an instant and then fasten again on the front of his shirt, pinning him against the scalding metal.

  Nick’s mind was a blaze of fire, and he felt a trickle of blood run down into his left eye. He shook it out and looked upward into the smiling face of the deputy sheriff.

  Peter sat in stunned silence.

  Kathryn rose and walked to the kitchen. She returned a moment later holding Jimmy’s journal in her hands. She held it open to him like a lectern, like the Book of Life revealing all that he had ever done or thought. Without a word she dropped it into his lap and backed away.

  Peter began to flip slowly through the pages, and wave after wave of agonized realization swept across his face.