by James Newman
For one day, at least, the Littles seemed destined for happiness.
The dawn of the New Year came and went with little or no fanfare for David and his family. Joel dropped by with Michael in tow, and despite David’s slight unease around his brother-in-law’s partner, the men emptied David’s liquor cabinet in record time and enjoyed one another’s company.
Before long, though, all of Morganville’s holiday bliss would pass like the brightness of day into night.
CHAPTER 24
“What do you want to watch first?” Joel asked his boyfriend, turning down the obnoxious rasp of static on the television. The New Year was only a couple days into its infancy.
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Just pick one,” Joel said, smiling. “Don’t be difficult.”
“Refresh my memory,” said Michael. “What’d we get?”
Joel read off the titles of the DVDs they had rented earlier from Blockbuster Video. A drama, a couple comedies. As he picked up each of the discs from the stack atop the television, the blinking lights from the Christmas tree in the corner painted the DVD cases varying shades of red and green and orange. None of the titles Joel held had struck either of the men as movies they were dying to see, but for lack of anything better to do on a Thursday night they had decided to spend some much-needed time together at home, a quiet evening with popcorn and movies and maybe a bit of lovemaking afterward if they were both in the mood.
“That new Jim Carrey movie looks like it might be a good one,” Michael said.
“Good call.” Joel slid the disc into the player before plopping down next to Michael on the sofa. He decided he probably did need a silly comedy flick to help him wind down. For the past couple of weeks, with the Billy Dawson thing and all, his life felt like one sick, gore-filled horror movie. A few laughs would be just what the doctor ordered.
As the previews played, Joel thought back to how he and Michael had met, how they had beaten the odds, and for what must have been the millionth time in the last few years he thanked God for sending him “the one.” Just a little over five years ago, Michael Morris had been no more than a faceless name, “Dragon25,” on the information superhighway. He and Joel had struck up a friendship on one of AOL’s many chat channels, specifically one for gay males between twenty-one and thirty looking for the same. Gradually their friendship progressed to more than just idle chatting on the Internet, and they exchanged phone numbers. Several days after Joel’s ordeal outside the bar back home, he had flown down to North Carolina to meet Michael face-to-face, and they had spent a week together. That week had been enough for both of them to know they had found true love.
One month later, Joel moved in with Michael.
Michael’s hand went to Joel’s leg now as he handed him the bowl of popcorn that had been sitting on the coffee table. Neither man could remember a time when he had been happier.
Of course, they were not surprised in the least when Joel’s pager went off on the dining room table.
“Aw, shit, Joel,” said Michael, “Please don’t get it.”
“I have to.”
Michael held Joel’s hand for a minute, wouldn’t let him go.
They stared into one another’s eyes. Finally, though, Joel’s hand slipped from Michael’s grasp. He leaned over, kissed his boyfriend on the forehead. “I’d better see what’s up.”
“Let it go. Just this once.”
“I can’t.”
“Please. Just tell them you dropped your pager in the toilet. It hasn’t been working right since.”
Joel shook his head, laughed. “Creative, hon...but you know I can’t do that.”
“I was hoping we could spend a quiet evening together,” Michael said.
“I’m sorry.” Joel walked to the dining room table, grabbed his pager. He was still smiling, hoping that his own pleasant attitude, in spite of the circumstances, would prevent any ensuing argument. He chewed at his bottom lip as he read the numbers on the pager’s quartz display.
“What is it this time?” Michael asked. He sat the bowl of popcorn back on the coffee table then, slamming it down a bit too loudly.
“I gotta go,” Joel said, reaching for his denim jacket on a nearby armchair. “I’m sorry, Michael.”
“What’s going on?”
“Sheriff’s Department. They’ve found another body.”
“Shit.” Michael sat up. “Joel, wait—”
Joel waved goodbye as he rushed out the door. “Gotta go! I’m sorry. I love you.”
“Whatever.”
Michael Morris said nothing else as he propped his feet up on the coffee table and glared at the television. He shook his head, exasperated, as Joel’s Mustang roared to life outside, and Jim Carrey tried to elicit a smile from a man who once again played second fiddle to his lover’s stupid job.
CHAPTER 25
“I think this case is pretty much cut-and-dry,” Sheriff Guice said as the younger man walked with him across Marietta Rude’s overgrown lawn. “But, just to be safe, you know...”
“Don’t mention it, Sheriff,” Joel replied. “It’s not a problem.”
Sheriff Guice glanced back, offered Joel a grin as they walked up the steps of the porch and through the front door of the Rude house. Guice and his men had placed several arc-sodium lamps about the premises, and now the shadows of those in attendance—Hank Keenan, another Sheriff’s Deputy whose name Joel did not recall, as well as several Rescue Squad first-responders who were useless here—flickered about the house’s foyer. Behind them, across the road, the yellow tape strung across the Heller property flapped and popped in the evening breeze, and the white crosses all over the property seemed to glow beneath the new moon.
The second they stepped inside the house, Joel winced.
“Agh, God.”
He covered his mouth with a handkerchief quickly plucked from his back pocket. Joel didn’t think he would ever get used to that smell. There was nothing like it. Death was one thing. But then there was the smell of death that had been sitting. Waiting. Death that had festered in the heat of a lonely house for weeks. This was a rank, bitter smell that was undoubtedly hideous, yet at the same time oddly sweet. Perhaps that was the worst part of all. That putrid sweetness stayed with you.
“Sorry I forgot to warn you,” said Sheriff Guice. “It’s bad. Really bad.”
“Mm-hm,” Joel said beneath his handkerchief.
Joel was already familiar with the situation at hand. He had been required to help Dr. Bonansinga on similar cases in the past, such as in the winter of 2001 when a hunter accidentally shot himself in the woods on the edge of town. The guy’s body had been found a month later. Fortunately, the man had met his demise on frost-hardened ground, not in a house whose furnace had kicked on and off hundreds of times, filling the house with stale heat that slowly roasted the body like a Thanksgiving turkey. That man’s body had been relatively well preserved, considering the circumstances. But this was different. Joel found himself wishing, as he made his way through Marietta Rude’s home, that he had stopped by the lab to pick up one of those painter’s masks, or at least a pair of the nose-plugs he often wore in situations like this.
“Who found her, Sheriff?”
“Vern Nicholson’s the mailman on this route,” Guice explained. “He’s been on vacation the past couple of weeks, otherwise I’m sure this would have been reported long before now. Younger fellow—guy by the name of Hewitt—has been filling in on Vern’s route. He must’ve realized something wasn’t right when he kept stuffing envelopes into Mrs. Rude’s box ‘til there wasn’t any damn room left. I guess he finally put two and two together.”
“Smart kid,” said Joel, though he had seen Vern Nicholson’s replacement around town, and Zack Hewitt was not much younger than himself.
“Friggin’ genius,” Guice said. “Anyway, we respond to the call, nobody answers the door, and this is what we find.”
Sheriff Guice stopped walking halfway down the main
hall of Marietta Rude’s home, and gestured toward the floor. He did not look down himself, though, turning away as if to study something toward the rear of the house. He brought out his own handkerchief now and held it to his mouth and nose.
Joel knelt beside Marietta Rude’s corpse and tried his damnedest not to gag. “Jesus, Sheriff. Looks like she’s been dead for a year.”
“I know.” Guice made a retching noise in the back of his throat. “Wouldn’t be so bad, seeing how it’s winter, but the old lady must have kept the thermostat set to damn near as high as it would go all day.”
In spite of the warmth that spread through the house, he shivered. Goosebumps spread across his forearms as he stared at the sticky black figure lying prone on the carpet before him. A brief image of the “Tar Baby” from those old B’rer Rabbit storybooks his mother used to read to him flashed across his mind.
“Natural causes, you think?” Sheriff Guice asked him.
“Probably. Mrs. Rude was, what, eighty years old?”
“Something like that.”
The two men stood over the body for several more minutes, saying nothing. Finally, the sheriff moved past Joel, back the way they had come, careful not to step anywhere near the leaking black thing at his feet.
“You okay, Sheriff?” Joel asked, hurrying to catch up with him.
“I’m fine,” Guice replied. “Just...keep me updated, would ya?”
“Will do,” Joel said. And then he went to work.
CHAPTER 26
This was no conclusion Michael had reached overnight. It had been a long time coming, really. For quite some time he had pondered whether he was being silly, whether it was childish to feel jealous over something that should have made him so proud.
It wasn’t that he didn’t respect Joel’s career and where it was going. He understood the concept of upward mobility, and he certainly strived for it himself. But things had never been like this. There had been so many nights over the past year when Joel did not come home at the promised time, so many nights working late because “the county needed him.” When Joel first got the job with Dr. Bonansinga—or “Dr. B,” as he had called the older man—three years ago, Michael had even considered the possibility that his lover might have been having an affair. That perhaps “Dr. B” might have been a horny old queen himself. But then he realized the silliness of such a notion, not only because he had heard Joel speak time and again of Bonansinga’s loving wife and three daughters, but for the simple fact that he knew Joel would never do such a thing to him. He thanked God that he had never mentioned such suspicions to Joel. Things had grown worse, however, since the medical examiner’s heart attack. Joel now put in twice as many hours at the lab, and sometimes it pissed Michael off so badly he thought about walking away from their relationship altogether.
He cursed himself. He knew he was being silly. What it all boiled down to was this: Michael Morris was jealous of a bunch of corpses. It was ridiculous, and Michael would be the first to admit it was ridiculous.
Still, he could not deny his true feelings.
Michael had seriously started wondering whether or not he wanted to continue with this relationship at all. There as a time, as recently as three or four months ago before this dilemma hit its peak, when he thought he might want to marry Joel. Now, though, as he accelerated along Highway 102, his emotions boiled within him, and Michael thought about what their future might hold. Could there be any real future for them at all? Could love survive when hindered by a career that constantly assumed precedence over everything else?
Michael didn’t think so. Not anymore.
The Charger’s headlights illuminated the houses along the side of the road as Michael drove faster and faster through Morganville. Speeding out of the town common and onto Pellham Road, he occasionally glanced in his mirror for the strobe-sign of bubble lights, one of Sheriff Guice’s deputies out cruising for speeders, but this was secondary in his mind. Background worry. For now, his mind swam with a thousand other thoughts, conflicting emotions concerning what he planned to say to Joel the next time they spoke.
Michael didn’t like conflict, never had. Confrontation was something he tried to avoid at all costs. Perhaps that was why he went through life feeling so scared all the damn time, so terrified of being alone, facing middle age like some dried-up old hermit queen who has forgotten long ago how to love. But he had always been like that. And now he knew he shouldn’t have waited until it got this bad. He should have mentioned his concerns to Joel earlier.
The Charger zoomed on down Pellham Road, rapidly approaching the outermost edge of Morgan County. Soon, Michael would pass completely out of Morganville, and maybe that would be for the better. Maybe he should go far away from here. As far as the highway would take him.
Maybe.
He reached down, turned on the radio. “You Shook Me All Night Long” filled the car. Cool. Michael normally didn’t care for that heavy metal shit Joel blasted every time they went for a drive together, but he could handle AC/DC. He smiled, tried to leave his worries behind him as his foot eased down on the gas and he turned the volume up even more. He bobbed his head to the music, tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
“Rock ‘n’ fuckin’ roll,” he said.
Michael looked up from the glowing green lights of his radio just in time to see a naked man with a long gray beard standing in the middle of the road.
The thing’s arms stretched out toward Michael, unnaturally long and skeletal.
Beckoning, like Jesus.
CHAPTER 27
When Joel at last returned home from dropping off the Rude body at the morgue, the house was dark. The television was off, and Michael was nowhere to be found. At first, he thought nothing of it. He assumed Michael had just stepped out for a breath of fresh air.
But then he saw the note on the dining room table. He squinted, holding it close to his face in the darkness. Scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, in Michael’s trademark microscopic scrawl of all-capital letters:
JOEL,
GONE OUT FOR A WHILE. NEED TO THINK A LITTLE.
DON’T WAIT UP.
M.
Joel stared at the note for a minute before he let it fall to the table.
More than anything, he felt confused. Unsure of what was going on. Was Michael angry? Hurt?
He’d been getting that signal from his lover lately, but neither of them had confronted the problem head-on. Not yet.
He scratched his head, stared at the empty apartment before him.
He didn’t get it.
What was Michael’s deal?
CHAPTER 28
“Gaaaa!” Michael cried, jerking the Charger’s steering wheel violently to the right.
Already, the man he had seen standing in the road—what the hell was some asshole doing standing in the middle of the road anyway?—had passed out of his line of sight, and now all he saw as the tires squealed and he fought with the steering wheel was a fat horizontal stripe across his windshield, bold black letters on a stark yellow background:
CRIME SCENE/DO NOT CROSS
The banner flapped away in the night then like some frightened, lemon-colored bird. The Charger jostled and rocked and bounced like a tiny boat caught in a frenetic storm. Michael cried out as his head hit the car’s ceiling, stammered “shitshitshitshit” as he realized where he had run off the road—on the old Heller Home property—but his mind barely had time to register his predicament as the Charger struck dozens of those off-white wooden crosses in his path. Charred hunks of debris and broken two-by-fours pounded against the undercarriage of the car, thumped across its hood and roof. Thick crabgrass swished and slapped against the car’s body like angry hands batting the intruder away, but still Michael could not stop. Fat gray clouds of ash ballooned in the wake of the Charger as it stirred up mounds of soot and black ember-chunks, and then there was nowhere else to go. The end of the meadow approached in the Charger’s headlights, a dark wall of trees that seemed to
step forward like a crowd of curious bystanders wishing for a closer look at Michael’s dilemma.
A crash, the sound of exploding glass—the loudest sounds he had ever heard in his life, other than his own hoarse scream a second before the collision—and then Michael saw only black.
CHAPTER 29
He moaned as he came to. A great weight pressed against his chest, a boulder of tightness that restricted his ability to breathe.
That weight, he realized, was the steering column. The dashboard. And everything behind it. He was pinned, couldn’t move.
“Fuck. Oh, fuck...” Michael saw that the Charger’s entire front end was crumpled, devastated, a thick spume of steam wafting up from under the hood and into the overhead leaves of the largest oak tree he’d ever seen. A giant spider-web of cracks spread through the windshield, and the whole thing drooped down toward Michael like a thin film of melted wax. Diamond-like pieces of glass lay on the dashboard, in his lap, in his hair.
His head felt cracked in a million different places, too. He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt.
“Agh, God,” he moaned. One hand went to his forehead. The movement caused his ribs to scream in agony. He winced, knew instantly that some of them were broken.
His hand came away from his forehead sticky with blood.
“Shit.”
And then he frowned.
“What the—”
Michael’s pain-fogged brain had not registered it before, but now he felt a wet, warm sensation at his otherwise numb groin. A pleasant, rhythmic feeling that came and went in gentle waves.
Like a blowjob.
He looked down, and his jaw dropped.
