Blackburn

by Bradley Denton

  Blackburn lowered her head to the pillow and dug out the donut with his fingers. The smell was thick and sweet. His trembling became violent. He tried to untie the cord around Heather’s left wrist, but his fingers were clumsy and numb. He was worthless, useless, a sissy, a pussy. Little Jimmy, dropping his pants and grabbing the rim of the wheel well. He could hear the fiberglass rod cutting the air. Its hiss became a scream, and it bit into his flesh. His skin caught fire.

  Then his hands spasmed, and his fingers sank in. It wasn’t the rim of a wheel well. It was the edge of a mattress.

  He wasn’t little Jimmy anymore. He had learned better. He had no father, no mother, no sister, no friends. His only trust was in himself. He could see not only what was, but what should be. He was Blackburn.

  And Blackburn always knew what to do, and how to do it.

  He tried the cord again. Heather’s left wrist came free, and her arm fell to the bed. Her fingernails scratched his face on the way down. The pain was sharp and pure. His trembling stopped.

  “Nasty,” a voice said. “But maybe she didn’t mean it.”

  Blackburn looked up. The bedroom door was open, and Roy-Boy was standing in the doorway. He was holding a small silver pistol. He gave his chuckle, his piglike grunt.

  “Look what somebody left behind the TV,” he said. “A twenty-five-caliber semiautomatic. Who woulda thought?”

  Blackburn stood. “This is what comes of committing a sin of omission,” he said.

  Roy-Boy’s expression became quizzical. “Omission of what?”

  “Your death,” Blackburn said. “I could see its place in the pattern of my world, but I left it out because I didn’t understand why it needed to be there. Now I see that the reason was obvious. Maybe even to you. Do you know why I should have killed you?”

  “Beats me,” Roy-Boy said. “But now you can make up for it with a surrogate. I was grooming her for myself, but when I saw you watching the place, I decided to save her for you. See, you need to become aware of the superiority of my world, and to do that you’ve got to live in it a while. In your world you’ve got your stud attitude, and she’s got her bouncy little ass … but when you try to pull that shit on me, it’s a different story. I’m Thomas Jefferson, and you’re slaves.”

  Blackburn took a step toward him. “So command me.”

  “Stop,” Roy-Boy said. He pointed the pistol at Blackburn’s face. “And pick up my ice scraper.”

  Blackburn stopped. He was at the foot of the bed, four feet from Roy-Boy. He reached down between Heather’s knees and picked up the glass shard.

  “Now cut her,” Roy-Boy said. “Anywhere you like. But cut deep, or I’ll shoot you.”

  “You’ll shoot me anyway.”

  “No, I won’t. I promise. I’m a moral guy too.”

  Blackburn gripped the taped end of the shard with both hands. The sharp end was pointed up.

  “Why should I have killed you?” Blackburn asked again.

  “Maybe because I threaten your masculinity,” Roy-Boy said. “So stick the glass between her butt cheeks. That should make you feel like a stud again.”

  Blackburn placed the point of the shard under his own chin and began to push upward. It hurt, but like Heather’s fingernails on his face, the pain was pure, cleansing. He thought again of Dad’s fiberglass rod. No matter how much he had hated it, it had contributed to his creation. This new pain reminded him of that truth.

  Roy-Boy grimaced. “Not you, Musician,” he said. He took a step toward Blackburn and pointed the silver pistol at Heather. “Her. Just turn around and—”

  Blackburn thrust his fists out and down, cutting his chin, and slashed Roy-Boy’s right wrist.

  Roy-Boy shrieked. He swung his pistol toward Blackburn again.

  But Blackburn was already lunging. He sank his teeth into Roy-Boy’s slashed wrist. With his left hand he grabbed the silver pistol and tried to yank it away. With his right hand he used the shard to rip and stab. Roy-Boy stumbled backward. He was screaming things that might have been words, but Blackburn didn’t listen to them. The only voice he listened to now was his own, the voice that told him what needed to be done.

  They fell to the floor in the hall. Blackburn kept his teeth clamped and his left hand on the pistol, but concentrated on driving the shard into Roy-Boy’s eyes, throat, belly, and groin. The odor of soap was overwhelmed by stronger smells. Before long the pistol came free.

  Blackburn rolled off Roy-Boy and squatted beside him. He threw the shard into the living room. Then he looked down at what remained of Roy-Boy’s face.

  “You’d like to believe you’re evil,” Blackburn said. “But you’re only stupid. Anyone who’s done it seriously knows there’s only one good way to kill: a bullet to the head. Of course, with the smaller calibers, it might take more than one.” He placed the muzzle of the silver pistol against Roy-Boy’s forehead. “Do you know the answer to my question yet?”

  One of Roy-Boy’s hands flopped aimlessly.

  “It’s simple,” Blackburn said.

  He cocked the pistol.

  “Because I felt like it.”

  He squeezed the trigger until the gun was empty.

  * * *

  Blackburn dropped the pistol on Roy-Boy’s chest and stood. He was dizzy for a moment and steadied himself against the wall, leaving a handprint. He was a mess. There had been a lot of blood some of the other times, but never this much. He wanted to brush his teeth and take a shower. He wanted to scrub and burn incense until Roy-Boy’s stink was gone.

  On the floor, the carcass twitched. Its ponytail had come loose, and the hair was spread out like a fan on the trash bag Blackburn had dropped. The plastic was keeping most of the hair off the wet carpet. Blackburn thought of taking the scalp, then rejected the idea. He didn’t want a trophy. He wasn’t proud of the way things had gone with Roy-Boy.

  He heard a noise in the bedroom and turned to look. Heather was up on her knees. She had managed to free her right wrist and was now trying to loosen the cords around her ankles. She wasn’t having any success. She was unsteady, swaying.

  Blackburn went to her. “I can do that,” he said.

  She looked up at him and tried to say something, or to scream. All that came out was a moan.

  Blackburn wiped his hands on his shirt. It didn’t help. His shirt was wet. “This is mostly his,” he said.

  Heather looked away as Blackburn untied the cords around her ankles. When she was free, he tried to help her up, but she pulled away and got off the bed on the other side. She stumbled into the hall.

  Blackburn pulled the top sheet from the bed. The apartment was cold, and he thought Heather should cover herself. He went into the hall and saw her step over Roy-Boy’s body. She didn’t seem to notice it. He followed her into the kitchen and turned on the light. Then he draped the sheet over her shoulders, and she didn’t even glance at him.

  He saw that she was no longer the Heather who had slept with him, and he knew that he was responsible. For the first time in his life, he was horrified at himself. Not for what he had done, but for what he had failed to do. In that failure, he had become an accessory to torture and rape. Killing was not always murder, and stealing was not always a crime … but torture and rape were absolutes.

  Heather lifted the receiver from a wall telephone and pushed 911. Blackburn heard the dispatcher answer the call, but Heather didn’t put the receiver to her ear. She stared at it as if trying to figure out why it was making noise.

  “Let me,” Blackburn said. He reached for the receiver.

  Heather jerked it away, then hit him in the face with it.

  His eyes filled with tears. The receiver had struck his nose hard. “Let me talk to them,” he said. “You’re hurt. You need to go to the hospital.”

  Heather dropped the receiver and yanked the telephone from its wall jack. The sheet fell away, and Blackburn saw the red lines that her wounds had left on it.

  She swung the telephone and hit his head. The
n she hit him again, and again. The telephone clanged, and the receiver bounced on its cord, thunking against the floor.

  Blackburn backed up against the refrigerator and then stood there, letting Heather hit him. He should never have begun stealing for a living. That moral slip had led to the next one, and that in turn had led to this. So he would take his punishment. It was the only punishment he had ever received that made sense.

  “I’m sorry,” he told Heather. She had become a blur. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  The telephone clanged. Heather began to grunt with each clang, and then to shout. There were no words. Only the voice of her rage.

  Blackburn heard it and knew it was just. He slid to the floor. The tiles were like cool water against his cheek.

  * * *

  And so the State of Texas took him, and healed his face, and charged him with rape and murder. He let the rape charge stand. Murder, however, he could not accept. He had killed, but he had never committed murder. This went double in the case of Roy-Boy.

  His court-appointed attorney said that this was not a suitable defense.

  Homicide investigators from across the nation came to Houston to question Blackburn, but he was only able to help two of them. Most of the others were trying to track down serial killers of women, and Blackburn had nothing to tell them about that sort of thing—except to say that there were a lot of bastards out there, and he should know, having killed a number of them.

  Then the State of Texas charged him with murder again.

  He was told that on the night that he and Roy-Boy had met, there had been a woman in the bedroom from which Roy-Boy had emerged. Blackburn had not known of her existence because she had been sick in bed for a week. She had been the sister of the apartment’s other occupant, the woman who worked the night shift at Whataburger.

  The sick woman had been tortured, raped, and killed.

  And since Blackburn admitted that he had been in her apartment on the night of her death, he was accused of the crime.

  Blackburn was astonished. “I’ve never killed a woman,” he told his interrogators.

  “Yet you’ve confessed to raping a woman,” one of them said.

  Blackburn shook his head. “No. What I confessed to was responsibility for that rape. And I won’t let you use that as grounds to blame me for something else.” He turned to his attorney. “You have to make them see my point.”

  “What point is that?” an interrogator asked.

  Blackburn looked at him.

  “One sin,” he said, “is more than enough.”

  VICTIM NUMBER NINETEEN

  The rape charge and one of the murder charges were dropped in April when Heather announced that she would not testify against Blackburn. It had taken her three and a half months of therapy and hypnosis, she said, but now she had grasped the reality of what had happened on the night she was attacked: Blackburn had not been her rapist, but her savior. While he had arrived too late to stop the rape, he had prevented the rapist from killing her. In order to do that, he’d had no choice but to kill the rapist. It had been justifiable homicide.

  Blackburn read Heather’s statement in the Houston Chronicle over and over again. His first thought was that she was overlooking some basic facts—such as that he should have killed Roy-Boy a week earlier, and that he had broken into her apartment in Roy-Boy’s company. But then some of her words began to resonate in his brain.

  “While I might wish that Mr. Blackburn had acted sooner,” she said, “I cannot condemn him for not having done so. He is only human. He did the best that he could.”

  That was the key. Blackburn had fallen short of perfection … but no one was perfect. To be human was to fail, and Blackburn could not escape his own humanity. So if Heather was willing to absolve his sin, he had to be willing to forgive himself for committing it.

  The State of Texas, however, was peeved. To make up for the charges it had lost, it added a new rape charge to the remaining murder charge.

  This pissed Blackburn off.

  “I didn’t kill that woman,” he told his attorney, “and I didn’t rape her either. I didn’t even go into the bedroom. I didn’t even know she was there.”

  “I believe you,” his attorney said.

  Blackburn found no comfort in that. “It doesn’t make sense. They’ve known all along that she was raped before she was killed, so if they were going to charge me with it, why didn’t they do it when they charged me with her murder?”

  “Because the physical evidence didn’t support it,” his attorney said. “The tests showed that the rapist had a different blood type.”

  “Roy-Boy’s.”

  “Yes. But now the prosecution will argue that you and he committed the crime together—that you also raped her, but didn’t ejaculate. You see, even though there’s no physical evidence, the jury’s likely to believe you did it just because the state accuses you of it. And that’ll help the prosecution push for a conviction and a capital penalty on the murder charge.”

  “But there’s no evidence for the murder charge either,” Blackburn said.

  The attorney looked down at his notes. “Well, there’s no physical evidence,” he said. “But you’ve already confessed to killing a man in Goodland, Kansas, in 1981, and another in Kansas City in 1982. You haven’t been charged with those crimes, but the prosecution will make a big deal of them anyway. Furthermore, you’ve admitted to being in the murdered woman’s apartment on the night she was killed, and the police found a homeless man who’ll testify to seeing you enter the premises within fifteen minutes of the time of death. That’s close enough for a jury.”

  “But I didn’t enter with Roy-Boy,” Blackburn said. “He went in through a window in the back, where the woman was. Didn’t anyone see him?”

  “Apparently not. But even the state admits he was there, so that’s the route we’ll take during the trial. We’ll try to make the jury believe that he did it, and that you entered the apartment several minutes later.”

  “Well, that’s what happened,” Blackburn said.

  “I believe you,” his attorney said.

  This time Blackburn not only found no comfort in the statement, but heard that it was a lie. His instincts told him that if he was going to get out of this mess, he would have to do it himself. This time, he would listen to them.

  The hearing on the new rape charge took place on Wednesday, May 14, 1986, Blackburn’s twenty-eighth birthday. His lawyer arranged for him to be allowed to wear a suit and tie instead of jail fatigues, but he was transported to the courthouse in handcuffs and leg shackles. His lawyer was not allowed to accompany him in the van.

  He sat on a wooden bench in the van’s rear compartment. Three Texas Department of Public Safety troopers serving as guards sat on a bench across from him. They wore cowboy hats and mirrored sunglasses. They reminded him of Officer Johnston.

  “You know that needle they stick in your arm,” one of the troopers said. “Supposed to be painless, but it ain’t.”

  Another trooper nodded. “It’s as big around as a garden hose.”

  “Sometimes they have to dig for twenty or thirty minutes to find the vein,” the third trooper said.

  Blackburn watched them. They were pretending to be talking to each other, but their message was for him.

  “Personally,” the first trooper said, “I wisht they hadn’t gone to the needle at all. It hurts some, but not enough. Not as much as this boy hurt that woman he killed.”

  “I’ve never killed a woman,” Blackburn said.

  The troopers turned toward him. Their mirrorshades reflected his face six times. The van went over a bump, and the reflections jiggled.

  “Shut up, boy,” the second trooper said. “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

  “You were speaking to me,” Blackburn said.

  The third trooper reached across with his rubber baton and jabbed Blackburn in the stomach. Blackburn saw it coming and tensed his muscles for it, then doubled over t
o make the trooper happy.

  “Don’t puke on them shiny shoes,” the first trooper said. “The judge won’t like it.”

  “Judges frown on puke,” the second trooper said.

  Blackburn sat up and smiled.

  “Wipe that grin off,” the third trooper said, “or I’ll give you another politeness lesson. You hear?”

  “Yes,” Blackburn said. “Thank you.”

  The troopers glanced at each other—or seemed to; it was hard to tell with the mirrorshades—and then laughed.

  “‘Thank you,’” the first trooper repeated. “Ain’t that polite?”

  “Polite as Sunday school,” the second trooper said.

  “Why you thanking us, boy?” the third trooper asked.

  “For giving me a reason,” Blackburn said.

  “A reason for what?” the first trooper asked.

  Blackburn said nothing.

  The van stopped in a tunnel under the courthouse, and the troopers hustled Blackburn to a courtroom where the third trooper took a set of keys from his shirt pocket and removed Blackburn’s handcuffs and leg shackles. That was another concession that Blackburn’s attorney had won for him. It was to be the last one.

  The hearing was quick. Blackburn’s attorney protested the rape charge, but the judge let it stand. Since Blackburn was to be tried for murder anyway, the judge said, the state might as well kill two birds with one stone and try him for rape at the same time. If the charge had no merit, the jury could say so. Bail was denied. Blackburn’s attorney sighed and said nothing more.

  Five minutes later Blackburn was in handcuffs and shackles again. Five minutes after that he was back in the van with the three DPS troopers, waiting on the driver and shotgun rider. The driver and shotgun rider had not expected to be needed again so soon, and had gone to the courthouse cafeteria. One of Blackburn’s troopers called them on a walkie-talkie, but they replied that it would be a few minutes before they could return to the tunnel.

  The troopers didn’t seem to mind.

  “Tough break in court today,” the first one said in mock sympathy.