by Edward Lee
“Where’s the chief?” Phil asked brusquely when he returned to the station at the end of his shift.
“You didn’t call in 10-6 for shift change,” Susan smirked in reply.
Phil fumed. “Straker, Philip, ID 8, reporting 10-6 from eight-to-eight shift. Out of service,” he said. “Now, where’s Mullins?”
“If you mean Chief Mullins, I believe he’s back in the supply building—”
Probably checking coffee filters, Phil thought,
But Susan Ryder continued from her console, “And one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. What kind of service ammunition are you loading…Sergeant Straker?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It seemed like a pretty cut-and-dry question to me. But just let me remind you that sabot, teflon, liquid-filled, and especially quad ammunition is illegal for all law-enforcement use in this state.”
So that’s it, Phil realized. That’s why the Ice Bitch hates me. “I get the gist of what you’re saying, Ms. Ryder, and not that I’m in the habit of reporting the nomenclature of my service ammunition to radio girls, I’m loading Plus P Plus .38 wadcutters, which is what I’ve always loaded.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” she said, and redirected her gaze into her textbook.
“Yeah, well, you’ve probably also heard that I’m a kid killer, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if you’ve heard that Jesus Christ is really an astronaut from another solar system and that Elvis is alive and well and has lunch regularly at Chuck’s Diner, nor would I be surprised if you actually believed those things.” Phil leaned over her console desk. “But let me make a suggestion, Ms. Ryder. I really think it would be prudent for you to not only get your snooty nose out of other’s people’s business, but you also might find life a lot more agreeable if you put a lid on that outrageous ego of yours, and—” Suddenly Phil pounded his fist—BAM!—down on her desk, whereupon Susan Ryder’s derriére lifted at least an inch from her seat in complete surprise. “—and let me tell you one more thing. I’ve never loaded quads, and I never killed a kid. That whole Metro mess was a sham, Ms. Ryder; I was set up. And if you don’t believe that, I don’t give a flying fuck. But I do have one more suggestion, you rude egomanical bitch. Don’t make judgments about people until you know all of the facts.”
Then, in utter calm, Phil turned around, walked into Chief Mullins’ office, and closed the door very quietly behind him.
God, I hate women so much sometimes, he told himself. Through the window, he saw Mullins coming out of the lock-up-turned-supply building and the man did not look happy.
When the back door swung open, Phil beat the chief to the punch. “Look, Chief, I’m sorry, but I forgot to pick up the coffee filters. Bust me.”
“Christ, you kids,” Mullins griped and sat his girth down behind his desk. “Can’t trust ya to take care of your own bowel movements, huh? Looks like I’ll have to waste valuable tax-dollar-time getting the friggin’ filters myself.”
“Guess so,” Phil said. “But I suspect the world will still continue to revolve while you’re gone.”
“That’s what I like about you, Phil. You’re a smartass after my own heart.” Mullins raised a paper cup and spat tobacco juice into it. “You stake out Krazy Sallee’s in plainclothes last night?”
“Yeah,” Phil replied. “Got some tag numbers, descriptions, stuff like that. It’s a good start.”
“You see that ugly fuck—Natter?”
“Yeah, Chief, I saw him.”
“You see anyone else?”
Phil rubbed at minute stubble on his chin. “Yeah, Chief, I did. And right now I got a burning question for you.”
“Lemme guess, hot stuff,” the chief said, “You saw Vicki Steele coming out of there, and now you’re pissed at me ’cos I didn’t tell you she was stripping up there.”
“Bingo,” Phil said.
Mullins spat again. “Well, I figure there’s things a man has to learn on his own, especially when it’s about a woman he’s still got the hots for.”
“I don’t have the hots for her. But I think it would’ve been pretty civil for you to warn me in advance. And you expect me to believe that Vicki Steele quit the department to do a strip show at Sallee’s?”
“No, I don’t expect you to believe that,” Mullins said very quickly. “So let’s make a little bit of an amendment to what I told you beforehand. Vicki Steele didn’t quit like North and Adams. I fired her.”
“For what?”
Mullins let out a stout chuckle. “Shit, Phil, you’re the one who dated her for five years. I gotta tell you?”
“You’re losing me, Chief. And you’re pissing me off more.”
“I fired her for dereliction of duty on the grounds of overt sexual misconduct.”
“Bullshit,” Phil said at once.
“Believe what ya want, son. But it’s true. You think I wanted to tell you about the shit she pulled?”
“Tell me,” Phil asked.
“She was fucking her boyfriends on duty, Phil. And since you asked for it, she had a lot of boyfriends. Or maybe I’m using the term ‘boyfriends’ out of respect—”
Phil glowered. “Be disrespectful, Chief.”
“She was fucking just about anything that moved,” Mullins pulled no punches. “Hey, you’re the one who asked. She was picking up guys at the Qwik-Stop and doing them right in the patrol car. She’d pull rednecks over at night for speeding, and she’d wind up fucking the guys. You want more?”
“Sure,” Phil said.
Mullins shrugged. “One night I came in and caught her blowing a prisoner in the lock-up. I got half a dozen complaints that she was rousting patrons at Sallee’s, pulling them over and threatening to DWI them, and then fucking the guys and letting them off. You want more, son?”
“Sure,” Phil said, a bit less enthusiastically this time.
“I have good reason—documented reason—to believe she was actually turning tricks while on duty. Threatening to write guys up for drinking behind the wheel, then fucking them for money in exchange for not writing them up. Christ, one night she even put the make on me, and I haven’t had a hard-on in about fifteen years.”
Phil sat back in his chair, reflecting. Vicki? A sex maniac? A…whore? Then he reflected further. She’d always been pretty feisty—and sometimes downright kinky—in bed. But that doesn’t mean she’s a nympho, he thought. Mullins seemed straight up about this—at least as straight up as he could be—but Phil had a hard time seeing Vicki Steele changing so drastically that she would actually blackmail traffic offenders into a scenario of prostitution.
“I just can’t believe it,” Phil said. “I just can’t see her doing things like that.”
Mullins’ brow raised as he took another spit. “Neither could I, until she told me the reason. And please don’t ask me to tell you what she said.”
“Tell me what she said,” Phil directed.
“You can’t handle it, Phil.”
“I can handle it. So quit fucking with me, will ya?”
Mullins set his jaw. He appeared genuinely distressed, which was something Phil had never recalled seeing. He cleared his throat, did a fidget in his seat, and said, “When I fired her, she said it was all because of you. You taking off without her. You dumping her.”
Phil stared. Could this really be? I cannot believe this, he told himself very slowly. Then his words grated, “I didn’t dump her.”
“Bullshit, Phil. When you leave a girl for a job, and she doesn’t want to move with you, that’s the same as dumping her. After you left she went nuts. She turned nympho. And when I shitcanned her, the very next week, she was stripping up at Sallee’s and turning tricks every night. Still don’t believe me?”
Phil’s voice turned black when he said, “No.”
Mullins, with a sour look, hoisted himself up, retrieved a folder from one of his file cabinets, and turned. “Buck North, Pete Adams, before they quit for the other departments, this
PCP headache was just starting up. So I had them doing the same thing you did last night. Staking out Krazy Sallee’s, trying to get a read on what’s going on up there. Only these guys didn’t just take down tag numbers. They took pictures.”
Phil gulped as if a chunk of broken glass had stuck in his throat…
“Take a peek at your own risk,” Mullins warned. “But don’t get pissed at me for showin’ ya, ’cos you’re the one who asked.”
Then Mullins dropped the folder in Phil’s lap.
It was some presage, a hideous one: Phil refused to believe any implication, yet his hands hitched toward the folder like someone about to unveil an as-yet unidentified cadaver on a morgue slab. He opened the folder—
No, he thought very simply.
—and stared. His face felt as though it had fused into a mask of impassive stone. A small stack of 8x10 black and whites showed him first several nondescript women leaving Sallee’s hand in hand with various rubes. All tackily dressed in tight skirts, glittery blouses, high heels. Some were clearly less-defected Creekers, like the ones he’d seen last night. Next, a few grainy telephoto shots, obviously taken with fast film through a low-light lens. The discreet snapshots depicted the same women engaged in various sex acts with rough, jean-jacketed men. In pickup trucks and souped hot rods, behind the building.
One photo showed a Creeker woman—with one arm undeniably longer than the other—lying on her back on the garbage dumpster behind Sallee’s, her legs wrapped around some anonymous redneck’s back. Natter’s Imperial was seen in several of the shots, and so was Natter himself, tall, gaunt, and crevice-faced as he leaned to speak to several patrons in the entry.
And the last four photographs showed Vicki Steele performing the act of fellatio in the cabs of different pickup trucks. A final photograph showed her flashing a wicked smile as she stuffed paper cash into her bra. Something shiny splotched her blouse and hair, which could only be semen…
“Told ya so, didn’t I?” Mullins harped. He loaded a fresh pinch of snuff and immediately spat. “But you wouldn’t listen. That’s your problem, Phil. You never listen to anyone. You always gotta know more than the next guy about everything.”
Fuck you, Phil thought, but now, as he closed the folder, he knew the chief was right.
I asked for it, I got it, he thought. Happy now, you asshole?
“Now you know the score,” Mullins informed him. His desk chair creaked as he shifted his significant weight. “Sometimes the world really can be a piece of shit, huh?”
Phil didn’t say anything. He coldly placed the folder up on Mullins’ desk, his face still stiff as plaster.
“Go on home. Get some sleep.”
Phil rose as if climbing out of a tomb. The imagery swarmed behind his mind: Vicki’s head buried in some slob’s lap, semen shining like diamond-points in her hair, and like jeweled studs on her blouse.
A whore, Phil thought as he walked out of the station.
I dumped her, and she turned into a strip-joint whore…
— | — | —
Eight
It was a fascinating sound, a slick wet clicking, like duct tape being pulled off something tacky.
The world seemed to hum in his head: glories, wonders.
Mishmash words ricocheted in his brain. My poor brethren, he thought. I bless thee in thy error. I love thee…
Ah-no-prey-bee!
Skeet-inner!
Ah-no, slave-luss!
He watched, in reverence, in faith. What an honor to behold sights such as this… He felt heady and warm. He felt exuberant. The flesh of the world… My God, we are blessed…
That slick, wet sound resumed. Colors glittered, contrast flashed. It was just so beautiful! Red running over white.
His eyes turned to the window, to the sky.
And the wet sounds continued.
Soon, the Reverend thought. His heart burned like an ember, an ember of love, a hot, glowing ingot of molten truth.
Yes. Soon it will be time again…
««—»»
He was a little boy. Bugs buzzed at his face, some of them sinking stingers. Dead branches and leaves crunched beneath his blacktop Keds as the sun blistered through the trees.
He didn’t feel good. At school, Miss Cunningham mentioned that a real bad flu from China was going around. I won’t get it, he remembered thinking. I’m not Chinese.
But his skin felt cold in spite of the drenching heat. His stomach felt dry—he’d thrown up earlier, hadn’t he?—and he knew it must be the stuffed peppers his aunt served for dinner last night. He hated stuffed peppers. Why couldn’t they eat Pop Tarts every night instead? The cinnamon kind were great, and the strawberry kind with the white icing…
He didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to believe he was sick. I’m not sick, he convinced himself. I don’t have any Chinese flu! So on he marched, wandering as children do in a pent-up glee, in a curiosity that was as honest as it was without direction of any kind. This gully here, he’d played in with his G.I. Joes. And over here by the stump that looked wide as a manhole cover, he and Dave “Cave” Houseman had shot at Nehi bottles with the BB gun that Cave had borrowed from Eagle. And they’d hit plenty of the bottles.
His Keds crunched on. He didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t care. One night he’d stayed over at Eagle’s house, to watch the Alfred Hitchcock show, and a lady on TV had killed someone with a frozen leg of lamb. And Eagle’s Uncle Frank had come in—he built houses—and said to never go in the woods because there were “things” in the woods that ten-year-olds shouldn’t see. So naturally the next day he and Eagle Peters had gone into the woods, which they did almost every day from then on. One time they’d found a warm can of Miller beer, and they even drank it once they found what Uncle Frank called the churchkey. Another time they found a dead cat behind Buckingham Elementary, and the cat’s belly was moving from a bunch of worms that got in it. And then there was another time they found a big dark-green plastic bag full of moldy magazines, only these magazines had lots of pictures of naked ladies in them, and they laughed because it reminded them of a show called Naked City. One of the ladies was pouring honey between another lady’s legs, then she was licking it off! In another magazine a lady was sticking a gun in another lady’s hole. And after that she was sticking cucumbers and bananas and things in her. And in one other magazine there was a caption that said “WENDY LIKES TO SUCK,” and that reminded them of the song they heard all the time, called “Wendy,” or was it “Windy”? The lady had a black man’s thing in her mouth!
He and Eagle roamed the woods whenever they could, but they never found the “things” that Uncle Frank said ten-year-olds shouldn’t see.
“Uncle Frank said a girl got raked out here once,” Eagle told him one day when they were shooting slingshots at bottles by the creek. “He said it said so in the paper.”
“A girl got raked? What’s that?”
Eagle seemed to know everything, and, as he lined up his next shot—at a Briardale Cola bottle—he spoke like it was nothing.
“It’s when a man puts his pee-er in a lady, and she doesn’t want to.”
This confused him. “Why would a man want to do that?
“‘Cos it feels good, stupid. Don’t you know anything? He squirts baby-juice in her, and it feels good.”
“Oh… What’s baby-juice?”
Eagle laughed. “You’re stupider than Larry on the Three Stooges! Baby-juice is the stuff that comes out a man’s pee-er when he puts it in a lady. It makes ’em have babies. But when rake-ists do it, they do other things too.” Eagle pulled the slingshot back. “Bad things.”
This made him wonder. When Eagle hit the Briardale Cola bottle, it exploded. “What bad things?” he asked Eagle.
They called him Eagle because he had blond hair, but his father always made him get a crewcut, so he looked like a bald eagle. And Eagle said, “Well, they beat the ladies up too, and sometimes they kill ’em.”
Something bloomed in the little boy’s head, a curiosity like the time he broke his arm, and it itched under the plaster so bad he stuck one of his aunt’s knitting needles up there to scratch it. When Doc Smith took the cast off, he cried ’cos the doctor did it with a little saw that sounded worse than Doc Verib’s dentist drill. And when the cast fell away, his arm was covered with white flakes, and all the hairs on his arm had turned blacker than Lisa Cottergim’s eyebrows. She was an Oriental girl who got ’dopted by her parents, and her pretty eyebrows were blacker than a crow’s feathers. Maybe she was Chinese, and that’s why they had this Chinese flu going around that his teacher had told him about. But, anyway, Doc Smith told him his hairs turned black only ’cos the plaster had covered the hairs from the sun for six weeks. And anyway something itched in his head just like the way his skin itched under the cast.
“What kind of…bad things?” he asked.
Eagle hogged the next shot at one of his G.I. Joes that had busted ’cos a rubber band broke inside and made his head fall off. “Like really bad things,” he said. His eye opened behind the rock. “Like this lady? After the man squirted a lot of baby-juice in her peehole, he squirted some in her butt, too—”
“He did not!” the little boy exclaimed, appalled.
“Yes he did, ’cos I heard my dad and Uncle Frank talking about it one night they thought I was asleep. They were watching Naked City and talking about the lady who got raked. And the rake-ist squirted baby-juice up the lady’s butt, too, and then…”
“What!” the little boy nearly shrieked.
“Then he tied her to a tree and hit her with a monkey wrench, and then he stuck the monkey wrench up her peehole. And after that—” Eagle seemed to pause, like he did when he was making something up— “he hit her in the head with a rake and kilt her.”
“With a rake? Why?”
“Why?” Eagle laughed at him again. “Because that’s what rake-ist’s do, stupid. That’s why they call it rake.”
The little boy wondered about this. It didn’t make sense. “But why would a man ever want to do that to a lady?”
