The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  “So people will think they saw you.”

  “I told you that boy was quick, Lionel.”

  “So who’s watching Doyle right now?”

  “I tipped one of the girls to pay special attention to him,” Lionel said, without taking his eyes off the street, “until I get back.”

  It was only four blocks to Doyle’s, Lionel pulling into the alley that ran between Princeton Place and Quincy Street. The alley had a cut-through that went behind the houses on both streets—the backyards faced one another across the alley—and they were in the alley behind Doyle’s, the place where the pictures had been taken.

  The side door slid open again and it dawned on Sully that it had all gotten out of hand, this story, his life, everything, since he’d come back from Bosnia, from Romania, from Afghanistan, from Gaza, from Nagorno-Karabakh. He had lost the ability to draw lines, to compartmentalize, to keep one part of his life separate from another. What was the morality in the war zone and what was the morality out of it? They were different, the rules were different, but what worked in war often worked on the streets if you just had the nerve. The blues were running into the greens, the yellows into the reds, the whole color wheel was just a blotch, and he did not think the colors would ever go back inside their lines again.

  He shoved the thought aside, forcing himself to think of Lorena, of Noel, of Lana, of Michelle and her father. He was going to make this shit right and he was going to do it right now, before sunrise. In front of him, Sly slipped out of the car without a word, as quick and quiet as a leopard, vanishing into the shadows of the alley. Sully followed, a sense of freefall, as if he’d just parachuted out of an airplane, thousands of feet of dead air beneath him, and then suddenly he landed. He was shuffling forward over the rough concrete as fast as he could.

  Behind him, Lionel pulled away, a thin plume of exhaust trailing. There was no sound now but that of his footsteps, his breathing. He and Sly were alone, and Sly had already cut the padlock on the wooden gate.

  forty

  The gate swung open when he pushed it—there were no springs—and it slapped back against the wooden fence. Sly, already inside, turned and glared. Sully pulled the gate shut, making sure the clasp did not click, and then turned and leaned his back against it. There was only one streetlight working in the alley, but it still cast dim shadows. Everything was quiet again.

  Sly, letting out a breath of exasperation, gestured toward the house with two fingers and then he was gone, hunched over, moving fast down the concrete slope, where a car would ordinarily be parked, to the peeling garage door, which looked as if it hadn’t rolled up since Nixon was in the White House. Sully could see, through a patch of streetlight, Sly move to his right, to the entry door. He was pulling open a pouch at his hip. Sully peered forward and saw Sly make a circle in the glass pane of the window on the door and tug. There was a faint tinkle of glass. A moment later, the door swung outward and open.

  Sly was gone, pulling the door closed behind him.

  Sully kept his eyes flicking from the windows of one house to the next door, expecting lights in adjacent windows to flick on, sashes to be thrown open, a belligerent voice to yell, “Hey! The fuck you doing?” But nothing stirred. He could not hear any cars passing, either on Princeton or on Park Place, the street running along the edge of the golf course behind them. After a few moments, he began to pick up the sounds of rain dripping from trees, from eaves, hitting the pavement below.

  In front of him, in Doyle’s weed-choked backyard, were two metal chairs pushed up against the wooden railings of the fence, a pair of wet cushions on the ground beside them. The sloped drive in front of him had a thick oil stain. The streetlight shadows over the edge of the fence made it hard to see the interior borders of the property, and in this darkness he felt safe.

  He counted to thirty, then forty-five, then eighty, and then the screen door opened on the tiny back porch. Sly came out into the half-light. He beckoned with a windmilling motion, and Sully kept to the shadows until he stepped onto the porch. From there he took hold of the open door and stepped inside, into the suffocating darkness.

  Sly pulled the door shut behind him and turned the bolt. He took out a flashlight and turned it on, keeping the beam on the floor. When he did, Sully could make out the thin nose, the cheekbones, the angular cast to his head, and he could see the flicker in his eyes.

  “What?” Sully said. “What?”

  “You take the upstairs, I’ll do the basement,” Sly hissed. “Move.”

  Sully advanced across the cheap linoleum of the kitchen, past the wooden shelves and pantry, all of it looking shipshape neat and well ordered. He kept to the right in the narrow hallway, then, when near the front door, made a U-turn to his left and was at the base of the stairs. He shone the light up the stairwell. He bit his lower lip and went quickly up the steps, keeping his feet to the outside edges to minimize the creaks.

  When he reached the landing, one bedroom was in front of him, a bathroom to his immediate left. The hallway was just to his left, on the other side of the banister, running back toward the front of the house. He flicked the beam down the hallway, illuminating two doors opening off to the right. He knew, from the layout of his own house, there would be a small bedroom first and then the master bedroom, with the windows facing the street.

  He walked down the hall and shone the light into the first room. There were three steel filing cabinets, each four drawers high and each looking as heavy as an engine block, set beside a heavy desk. It was designed to be a bedroom but Doyle had converted it into an office. Sully took three steps farther down the hall, pushed the door open with the flashlight, peeking into the man’s bedroom. It was neat, orderly, and almost completely bare. A bed: a mattress on the floor, no box spring. The sheets were pulled up and tucked in neatly. There were no pictures, no paintings, nothing on the peeling walls. An ancient telephone, its cord coiled and looped, sat by the pillows.

  He went back into the converted office, the steel desk looking identical to the kind Doyle kept in his office at the store. The top of it was bare—free of paper, of files, of anything. The filing cabinets were not locked. The top two drawers were packed thick with manila folders, headings scrawled in bold black lettering on the raised tabs. Most seemed to apply to the store, others to cars he had owned, others labeled REFRIGERATOR and HAULING and BOAT, then folder after folder marked PAYROLL. There was tax information and three files on roofing problems. It smelled musty, old.

  The bottom drawer was packed solid with pornography.

  It was, Sully noticed as he bent down to lift a few magazines to peek at the titles farther down, all hard-core stuff, all black and Hispanic women, crude titles devoted to specific parts of the female anatomy.

  “Hey.”

  He jumped halfway to the ceiling. Sly materialized at the door, shining a flashlight in his face.

  “Goddammit, would you give—”

  “Come on. You got to see this.”

  • • •

  Sly led the way to the first floor, making the U-turn at the bottom of the steps turning to the back of the house. When he got to the door that led to the basement, he pulled it open and stepped down to the landing. Below them was a gulf of blackness, pierced only by the narrow beam of his flashlight. He looked at Sully and said, “We’re out of here in five minutes—I don’t care what you think. Pull the door behind you. And don’t fucking trip on anything.”

  Sully nodded, closing the door, following Sly down the wooden steps, concentrating on the beams of the flashlights. When they both reached the bottom, Sly said, “There’s a laundry room at the back, and he blacked out the windows, so the lights don’t matter.”

  He flicked on the switch.

  Sully blinked rapidly and closed his eyes for a second in the sudden brightness of the bulbs that dangled overhead.

  His first thought was that Doyle had clos
ed off the garage years ago and converted the back part of the basement into living space. The floor was packed dirt with large rectangular planks of wood set over it, covered by cheap brown carpet.

  The carpet had been pulled back, though, and one of the planks partially pulled to the side. The smooth, packed dirt beneath it was loose.

  “I walked in, nearly tripped over the planks,” Sly said. “So I pulled it back to see.”

  Only then did Sully look at the walls, at the dozens of photographs, at the shelves with their neatly packaged rows of mementos. The pictures and talismans were grouped by each woman.

  It was some sort of shrine, an altar. He recognized pictures of Rebekah Bolin, Michelle Williams, Lana Escobar, and other women he did not know. Items of clothing were neatly set out—a T-shirt, bras, panties, shoes. The photographs of Michelle featured a picture of her at the front door of Goodwin’s house, taken by some sort of overhead camera in the center. Others had similar pictures. Then there were the death pictures, the women nude, dead, posed as if in erotica.

  “Christ, he got half of them to come here,” Sully said. “For what? Cleaning? Washing the dishes? But what did he do with them all?”

  “You ain’t looking,” Sly said, tapping his foot.

  Sully looked down again. With a toe, he pushed the plank all the way to the side. The dirt beneath it had been freshly disturbed.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  On instinct, the buzzing in his ears now, he went to the laundry room at the back, turned on the light, and there, in the back corner, was a shovel. A pick was next to it. Hurrying now, carrying both, he came back to the main room.

  “The hell you are,” Sly said.

  “You said five minutes. Won’t take that if you get off your ass.”

  The shovel pitched into the earth with ease—it was not settled earth—and he was digging hard, attacking the loosened soil, throwing spades of earth back without regard for the grit or the noise of it or the damp clumps spraying everywhere. Sly sighed and worked the top end of the dirt with the pick.

  After a minute, Sly said, “Shit.”

  He did not remove the pick, but moved the dirt around it with his foot. Sully worked his shovel a foot or so from the pick until it met resistance. Sly pulled up the pick, gingerly. A rotted leg appeared. Sully, dropping to his knees, was digging at the dirt with his gloved hands now, moving it aside, until the corpse’s chest and neck and, finally, decomposed face came into view.

  The clothes were rotting, most of the skin gone, but there was still hair and fingernails and a blouse. Sully stood upright, looking down at the corpse.

  “Michelle,” he said.

  • • •

  Sly picked up the shovel and pick, moving them back to the laundry room.

  “You got to go,” he said. “Get on out the back, walk to your bike—do not fucking run, you hear me, I said walk—and get home. Call somebody. Get an alibi. I got work here.”

  “Work? What work?” There was an electric air to the room, a static charge that seemed to set everything atilt and lit from within, as if the whole room were wired to explode. “All we got to do is get out of here and call the police. This shit is over.”

  Sly was already in the doorway of the laundry room, looking back at him.

  “Leave, and leave quick,” he said. “You not listening. I ain’t far behind. But get. Don’t you fucking call the cops until you hear from me.”

  “When is that going to be?” a harsh whisper, his voice feeling strangled.

  “After daybreak.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “What?”

  “Fuck that, Sly. You not telling me to get lost till the sun comes up. We walk out, make an anonymous call, game over. We got all we need. Ballgame.”

  “Yeah?” The pistol in Sly’s right sleeve dropped down into his hand. Sully looked at it and rolled his eyes but did not move forward.

  “’s what I thought,” Sly hissed. “Now. I’m respecting you, right? I ain’t starting no shit with you, right? Gimme a minute and I’ll see you on the block.”

  Sly disappeared into the back, conversation over. Sully took another look around the room, the sickness of it, and turned, ready to be outside, ready to be somewhere else, fuck Sly and fuck this nonsense, it just wasn’t worth all this shit. It was not his best moment, but he didn’t care anymore, he just wanted out, and he hurried up the steps as fast as his gimp leg would allow, feeling claustrophobic and sick, the smell of death getting to him, the eyeless skull. The stairs creaked beneath his weight. Once in the hall, he turned to the back of the house, making his way by the streetlight from the alley out back.

  The hallway light clicked on.

  He wheeled around to whisper at Sly to turn the goddamn thing off and Doyle Goodwin stood in the foyer, jacket still on, closing the front door behind him.

  forty-one

  It was still misting rain. That was the first thing that shot through Sully’s mind.

  Doyle was looking at him, his hair dotted with raindrops, the jacket damp. He must have walked home from the Show Bar, his evening stroll past the houses where he buried his victims, back home to the nest. His hands were in his jacket pockets and his right hand moved this way and that. Sully, keeping his eyes locked on Doyle’s, knew he was getting a grip on his gun, clicking off the safety. The movement, a thumb moving from right to left, made him remember that he’d left his own gun in his cycle jacket at Sly’s.

  He backed up involuntarily. Never back up never back up. You want a dog to chase you? Run. But he didn’t have any choice now, he had to give ground to gain time. The kitchen, he was backing into the middle of the kitchen, furiously trying to recall the layout and what cover or weapons he might find. The back door was perhaps twenty feet away, a fatal distance.

  “Didn’t know you had a thing for sisters and hookers, Doyle,” he said, stalling, oh sweet Jesus, stalling.

  “I tried to help you,” Doyle said, shaking his head. “I tried. I gave you the judge. And you just wouldn’t take it and go.” A high-pitched giggle.

  He’s drunk. Drunk off his ass. Stall him, stall him till you get to the door.

  “You got a real bad problem, Doyle.”

  “No,” Doyle said, bringing the gun out and up now, smiling, drunk out of his mind. “You got a problem. My problem ends with you.”

  “How come you don’t got the pictures of Sarah up yet?” Sully said, gesturing toward the basement, desperate to retrack Doyle’s mind. “You did her to get back at Reese, yeah? You saw Noel every day. You wanted to fuck her so bad you could taste it. And she ignored your ass and gave it up to the judge. Left you with fat, ugly hookers.”

  “Sarah?” Doyle laughed, a mirthless rattle in the chest, still walking forward, passing the basement door, cutting him off there. “Sarah? What makes you think—?”

  A shadow burst out of the basement, a blur that slammed into Doyle and catapulted him into the wall. Doyle dropped his gun. It fired on impact with the floor, blowing a hole in the wall. Sully leapt forward to get the gun and Sly pinned Doyle, whipped his Glock out and against Doyle’s temple, hammering it against the wall, and then there was an explosion of noise and blood and brains and shattered skull.

  Doyle’s body slid down the wall, mouth open, eyes open, half his head gone, his blood and gore painting the wall, until he reached a splayed sitting position. Then he slumped forward.

  Sully’s ears rang. The blood was still oozing outward on the wooden floor. It was coming over to the kitchen linoleum now.

  A moment passed. Sly looked down at the body, then lightly kicked Doyle’s thigh. “I ought to get a gotdamn reward.”

  Sully leaned down and put his hands on his knees, trying to get his breath. “I wasn’t thinking about that exactly.”

  “No?” Sly was still looking down at Doyle.

  “Wha
t—what I was thinking about was more about how he came in the—”

  “Wasn’t nothing to worry about. Lionel buzzed me he was coming up the sidewalk.”

  “And you let me walk upstairs?”

  “You were halfway up there already. It worked out better, catching him in the hallway like that.”

  “Better for who?”

  Sly didn’t answer, but bent down and picked up Doyle’s gun with his gloved fingers, then reached into a pocket and pulled out his cell, punching in numbers.

  Winking at Sully, speaking to Lionel, he said, as relaxed as if going for a Sunday drive, “Come on. Bring the stuff. Them gas cans, too.”

  forty-two

  By dawn, the blaze was billowing out the first-floor windows, glass breaking with the heat, orange flames licking up the front of the house. Firefighters were shouting that the roof was caving in at the back. Fire engines, set up in the rear alley and out front on Princeton, were as much watering down the houses on either side as they were training the hoses on Doyle’s, trying to keep the flames from jumping from one roof to the next, Sully figured. That happened, the entire block would be an inferno.

  He was standing on the sidewalk behind the police barricade, showered, in a fresh change of clothes. All the old clothes—shirt, pants, shoes, socks, underwear, everything—were in a dumpster in an alley halfway out to the Beltway.

  The David Reese story was on the front page, dominating the early news shows, but it was quickly being engulfed by the fire and its darker revelations, the thick black cloud of smoke going straight up and then spiraling over the golf course, filtering toward downtown and the federal city.

  It was visible from the Capitol building as a dark finger on the horizon, a foreboding image, and the networks and cable channels were keeping their cameras trained on it from their rooftop sets near the Capitol. Cameras could take in the host talking with the Capitol dome in the background, and then just pan to the spiraling smoke.