The Night Monster

by James Swain

  “Lonnie got sent here as a kid,” Hinst said. “Mother and two sisters raised him. He was a giant, and he was also retarded. When he got a little older, he started to hump one of his sisters, so his mom made him live in the basement. I guess that changed him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, one day he came upstairs when his mother and sisters were eating dinner. Had a sledgehammer in his hand. He bludgeoned his mother and one of his sisters to death. The other sister got away and called the police. They arrested him, and sent him here. Lonnie was thirteen.

  “I remember the day they brought Lonnie in. They wanted to put him in a juvenile detention center, only Lonnie was too big. He was six foot six inches tall, and weighed a hundred sixty pounds. Boy was nothing but skin and bones.”

  “He’s plenty strong now. Why do you think that is?” I asked.

  Hinst finished his cigarette and threw the butt into the courtyard. Lit up another and offered me the pack. Mine wasn’t done, but I took a fresh one anyway.

  “You know anything about giants?” Hinst asked.

  I shook my head.

  “They have something wrong with their pituitary gland, and can’t stop producing growth hormones. Unless they get treated by a doctor, they’ll keep on growing until they die. But here’s the strange thing. They’re not very strong. They’re so big, their bones have a hard time supporting their muscle mass. As a result, they cramp a lot. Something to do with all the sodium in their bodies.”

  “So what happened to Lonnie?”

  “The doctors fucked with him. They did a procedure that stopped his pituitary gland from producing hormones. By then, Lonnie was six-ten and still skinny as a rail. The doctors decided to beef him up.”

  “How? By feeding him?”

  Hinst shook his head. The expression on his face was pained. My mind flashed back to the bloody cotton ball and plastic syringe I’d found in Lonnie’s motel room.

  “Don’t tell me they gave him steroids.”

  “That’s exactly what they did. And boy, did he get strong. Put on a hundred twenty pounds of muscle in a few months. I used to go into that room and see him doing push-ups for a half-hour straight. He was a monster.”

  “Weren’t people afraid of him?”

  “Sure they were afraid. But the folks running this place didn’t care. Lonnie was an experiment to them, not a person. They didn’t care about him at all.”

  “When did Mouse enter the picture?”

  “You know about Mouse?”

  “He and Lonnie are still together.”

  Hinst swallowed hard. Again he shook his head. “Mouse was a criminal. Can’t say I ever heard his real name. He convinced a judge he was crazy, so he got sent here. But he was crazy like a fox. He used Lonnie. They were a team. Even the guards were scared of them.”

  “Do you know this area well?”

  Hinst nodded. “Sure. I grew up around here.”

  “There’s an abandoned farm a few miles north of here. Lonnie and Mouse hid there with a nurse they abducted from this facility. A woman named Kathi Bolger.”

  I thought Hinst was going to hit the floor.

  “You mean Kat Bolger? Oh, my God. She used to take care of Lonnie.”

  “I need for you to tell me about her.”

  Hinst ground the tiny butt of his cigarette into the floor, and made a Follow me motion with his hand. Together we walked down the hall to the sleeping quarters.

  “This was the last place I saw Kat Bolger,” Hinst said, standing in the room’s center. “Right in this very spot. She was helping push a patient on a gurney.”

  “When was this?”

  “It was the last day, right before Daybreak was shut down. The state medical examiner had made a surprise visit, and saw all the shit the doctors were pulling. You know, doing experiments on patients without their permission. Like with Lonnie.”

  “So Lonnie wasn’t the only one they messed with.”

  “No. It was widespread. Later the state went and blacked out all the records, just so no one would find out what the doctors were doing.”

  “What happened the day Daybreak was closed?”

  “The place was a madhouse, and that’s no joke. The patients were screaming and refusing to leave. This was home for most of them, and they didn’t know where they were being sent to. Bad thing to do to a crazy person.”

  “You said Nurse Bolger was pushing a gurney.”

  “That’s right. There was an orderly with her. A buddy of mine named Grady. Grady and Bolger were pushing a patient out of the ward.”

  “Who?”

  Hinst gave it some thought. “Oh, shit. It was Lonnie. Lonnie got sick, and passed out. Grady was sent up to help Bolger move him out.”

  “You’re sure this happened on Daybreak’s last day?”

  “Yeah. People were flying around everywhere.”

  And in all the confusion, Mouse and Lonnie grabbed Bolger and escaped.

  “I need to find Mouse and Lonnie,” I said. “Do you remember their last names?”

  Hinst scratched his chin. “Let me think. Lonnie’s began with an R. I think it was Polish. I never heard Mouse’s last name.”

  “You’ve got to try. It’s important.”

  Hinst shut his eyes and attempted to dredge up their names from his memory. After a moment his eyes opened, and he shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, mister,” Hinst said.

  My spirits sagged. Another dead end.

  We started to leave. Walking out, Buster’s nose twitched. He’d picked up a scent. I let him lead me across the room to a closet. He scratched at the door, and I tested the knob. It was locked.

  “What’s in the closet?” I asked.

  “It was used for storage. Why?”

  “My dog thinks there’s something in there.”

  “We shouldn’t be messing around in here.”

  “I’m going to see what’s inside.”

  “Well, I guess I can’t stop you.”

  I got a tire iron from the trunk of my car, and used it to pry open the door. Inside the closet were rusted bed frames and a steel drum spray-painted with the word Daybreak. Hinst helped me roll the drum out into the center of the room, and I popped the lid with the crowbar. The smell nearly knocked me off my feet.

  “What the hell is that odor?” Hinst said.

  I looked inside the drum. Lying on the bottom was a corpse dressed in a green orderly’s uniform. The corpse’s body was broken in several places, and had been folded together like a bunch of sticks. The name tag above his pocket said Grady.

  CHAPTER 42

  have seen the dead more times than is healthy. One thing I’ve learned from the experience: The dead don’t talk, but they do scream.

  Hinst and I sat on a concrete bench in the cool shade of the courtyard. Hinst smoked cigarettes until his pack was gone. Looking at his profile, I could tell that finding Grady’s body inside the drum would haunt him for a long time.

  I had a general idea of what had happened the day Daybreak shut down. Lonnie had played sick. Bolger and an orderly tried to move him. Lonnie killed the orderly, and held Bolger against her will. Mouse put on a stolen orderly’s uniform. Then they forced Bolger to come with them, took her car and escaped, never to be seen again.

  “His name was Grady York,” Hinst said after awhile. “We used to go out for beers. He’d been over in ‘Nam, too. I talked to him the morning the place was shutting down. He agreed to meet me after work for a cold one. When he didn’t show, I figured he’d just blown me off. You know how it is.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Hinst scratched Buster’s head. My dog had parked himself at Hinst’s feet, and was leaning against his leg, like he knew how much Hinst was suffering and wanted to comfort him.

  “I need to find Lonnie and Mouse,” I said. “Is there anything else that you remember about them? Anything at all?”

  Hinst gave it some thought. I listened to the wind whistle through
the empty buildings. It didn’t sound like any wind I’d ever heard before.

  “Come to mention it, yeah,” Hinst said. “Mouse used to bum smokes off the guards. We talked a few times. I think he knew that I knew he wasn’t crazy. He kind of got off on that, you know?”

  “Like you were a co-conspirator,” I said.

  “Yeah. Mouse told me something once that stuck in my head. He said that if he ever got out of Daybreak, he was going back home. I said something like, ‘Why go home? The police will just arrest you.’ And Mouse smiled and said, ‘The police don’t arrest people where I’m from.’ That always struck me as odd, you know?”

  “Did he mention the name of the town?”

  “No. But he was definitely from Florida.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mouse called himself a cracker. Only Floridians do that.”

  “I need to call the police. They’re going to ask you a lot of questions.”

  Hinst blew the smoke out his lungs. He dipped his head, and started to weep. It was an anguished sound, filled with the remorse that comes from wishing you’d acted differently than you had. Finally, it subsided, and he rubbed his face with his sleeve.

  “Grady was my buddy,” he whispered.

  “I know he was,” I said.

  A cruiser showed up, and the uniform took our statements. Officer Riski again. Riski cracked a joke, and said that wherever I went a dead body usually followed. Riski was trying to be funny, only there was nothing funny about finding a dead man stuffed into a drum.

  I sat in my car and tried to shake the images from my head. A couple of songs on the radio didn’t help. Nor the AC blasting in my face. Buster lay on the passenger seat, and I pulled his head into my lap, and buried my face in the soft fur of his neck.

  After a while I started to feel better. Not a lot, but enough to chase away the dark clouds circling around me. Deciding to take advantage of my weakened state, Buster rolled over on his back. I obliged him with a tummy rub.

  My cell phone beeped. I went into voice mail and retrieved the message. It was from Tony Valentine, the casino consultant whom I’d helped nab the gang of cheaters at the Hard Rock. Valentine had sent a text message along with an attachment. I read the message first. It said, “Is this the guy you’re looking for?”

  Valentine had impressed me as a smart guy, and not someone who’d waste my time. I opened the attachment. It was a mug shot of a white male with sandy brown hair and a loopy grin on his face. The photo wasn’t great, and I brought the phone a few inches from my face, staring for what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds.

  Mouse.

  I got so excited, I hit the horn with my fist. Across the courtyard, Officer Riski jumped a few inches in the air. I rolled down my window.

  “Sorry. My mistake.”

  Riski shot me a dirty look and resumed questioning Hinst, who still sat on the concrete bench. I rolled the window back up, and called Valentine.

  “Grift Sense,” Valentine answered.

  “This is Jack Carpenter. You got him.”

  “Good. I owed you one.”

  “Tell me how you found him.”

  “All it took was a phone call to Chief Black Cloud at the Hard Rock. The Native American casinos keep a national database of people who cause trouble in their casinos. They call the database American Eagle. Most of the people on it are card counters and cheaters, but there’s also plenty of scum.

  “Something told me this guy you were chasing had done this before. So I asked Chief Black Cloud if he’d take the guy’s photo off the Hard Rock’s surveillance tape, and run it through the American Eagle database.”

  “And a match came up.”

  “You bet. His name is Andrew Lee Carr, nicknamed Mouse. He got backroomed at the Hard Rock’s Tampa casino three years ago. A coed from the University of South Florida claimed Mouse was following her around the casino, and trying to film her. Security pulled him off the floor and questioned him. Carr claimed the girl had flirted with him, and that he hadn’t broken any laws. They eventually let him go.”

  “The casino didn’t call the police?”

  “Unfortunately not. I also ran a background check on Carr. He was arrested in 1985 for robbing two convenience stores in central Florida and shooting the cashiers at point-blank range in the face. One of the cashiers died. Carr was eventually caught, and charged with first-degree manslaughter. His defense attorney convinced the judge that he was insane. He helped his cause by smearing his own feces on the defense table during the jury selection at his trial.”

  “That’s a new one,” I said.

  “Tell me about it. The judge sent him to a mental institution called Daybreak. I tried to get some information on the place, but there was nothing out there.”

  I leaned back in my seat and took a deep breath. My wife was fond of saying that everything in this world happened for a reason. There had been a reason why I’d met Tony Valentine, and now I knew what it was.

  “You just made my day,” I said. “Let me ask you something. Did the report mention Mouse’s hometown?”

  “Hold on, let me take a look.”

  Valentine put me on hold. I rolled down my windows, and let the hot air invade my car. Every tired bone in my body felt refreshed. I’d found the bastard.

  Valentine came back on the line. “Your friend is from a small Florida town called Chatham. I just looked it up on my computer. Chatham is about ten miles north of St. John’s River, in the central part of the state.”

  Mouse had boasted to Ray Hinst that the police in his hometown wouldn’t arrest him. What better place for Mouse and Lonnie to hide than Chatham?

  CHAPTER 43

  left Daybreak feeling better than I had in a long time. I knew the name of one of Sara Long’s abductors as well as the name of the town he and his partner were hiding in. Mouse and Lonnie were in my sights.

  But rescuing abduction victims was never easy. And there was the matter of dealing with the sheriff of Chatham. Before I went charging in with guns blazing, I needed to figure out what his deal was.

  It took an hour to reach my office. During the drive, my cell phone rang several times. I kept my phone on a Velcro strip attached to my dash, letting me see who was calling without taking my hands off the wheel. Burrell was trying to track me down.

  I thought I knew what Candy wanted. She’d caught wind that I’d unearthed another corpse and wanted to know how it fit into my search for Sara Long. Being the lead investigator on Sara’s case, Burrell had a right to know everything I knew. Not telling her what I’d learned was against the law and could land me in real trouble. Only right now, the last person I wanted to be talking to was a cop.

  I didn’t take her call.

  ———

  Tugboat Louie’s parking lot was jammed, and I parked on the road. Kumar was checking IDs at the front door when I entered. Inside the bar, wild women were dancing on tables while drunk men stood and cheered. Party time had begun.

  “A police detective has been calling for you,” Kumar said.

  “Detective Burrell,” I said.

  “Yes. She asked me to give you a message.”

  “Just pretend you didn’t see me come in,” I said.

  Kumar’s eyebrows went up in alarm.

  “I hope you’re not in trouble,” he said.

  Back when I was a detective, I’d learned that you weren’t doing your job right if you weren’t causing trouble. The trick was learning how to deal with it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  Kumar covered his eyes with his hands. “Very well. You were never here.”

  I went upstairs to my office. The commotion from the bar was so loud that my office furniture was vibrating. I sat at my desk and tried to block out the noise.

  I booted up my computer and logged onto the Internet. It was hard to remember what detective work was like before high-speed computers. A great deal of time had been spent on the phone, try
ing to track down leads and information. Now most of what I needed was a few clicks away.

  On Google, I did a search of Chatham. I was not familiar with the town where Mouse was from, but that didn’t mean much. There were thousands of small towns in Florida, many not big enough to be included on a map.

  Chatham didn’t warrant a lot of ink. Fifteen miles north of the Ocala National Forest, the town did not have a website, nor was it included in the website of any of the neighboring towns. Outside of a few cheap motels that catered to hunters and fishermen, there was no real information about the place. In the infinite world of cyberspace, Chatham hardly existed.

  I did a public records search of Chatham on a county website, and got a better feel for the place. The town was incorporated, and boasted eight hundred residents. There was a mayor, a town clerk, and a sheriff, all of whom were elected officials.

  The sheriff was the person I was most interested in. His name was Homer Morcroft. I did a search of his name, and discovered a newspaper article from 1984 that talked about Morcroft having just been elected sheriff. He’d been policing the town for twenty-five years.

  A knock on my door broke my concentration. “We’re all friends here,” I said.

  Kumar popped his head in. “The lady detective just called the bar, and asked the bartender to page you. He told her he thought he saw you come in.”

  I cursed under my breath. I knew what was going to happen next. Burrell was on her way here, and would confront me. I shut down my computer, and rose from my desk.

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said.

  I got in my car, and fled south on I-95.

  I knew what Burrell would do when she didn’t find me at Louie’s. She’d drive to the Sunset and look there. When that failed, she’d drive to my other haunts and look. We’d worked together eight years, and Burrell knew the places I frequented. The only way to avoid her was to not be at any of them.

  It was time to bring Linderman into the fold. I called his office, and when he didn’t answer, tried his cell phone. He didn’t pick up, so I called his house.