Harry was in his fifties, the same as Eddie, but he was in far better shape. Standing almost six feet, two hundred pounds and built of solid blue-collar muscle, intimidation came naturally to him. He grew up working at the Bentley Warren gravel pit over in West Elm, running the rock crusher for almost twenty years before starting his own trucking business and then parlaying that into politics. His mix of street smarts and common-man work ethic had made him a shoo-in when he finally decided to run for mayor of Heartsridge. He was a man of the people, for the people. He reminded folks that hard work paid off. In a way, he represented hope. And for that, he was loved.
“Okay, don’t blow a gasket,” Eddie said, pushing his glasses back up. He walked over and grabbed the bucket.
Harry brought his hand up to his head, clamping his middle finger and thumb over his temples. The veins throbbed beneath the surface, his head flaring behind the eyes. “This fucking heat,” he muttered.
“What’d you say?” Eddie placed the bucket in front of Harry. “You okay? You look a little worse for wear.”
Harry looked up, his eyes sunken and dark. “Yes. I’m fine.” He dropped his hand away from his head and turned back to his car, grabbing two of the jugs off the roof. He pulled their caps off with his teeth and proceeded to dump the water into the bucket. “Now, where were we?”
Eddie eyed the bucket. “You were talking about the festival,” he said, distracted.
“Right, yes, Spring Festival. It’s going to be big this year, real big. It should bring us a good haul in tourist dollars, too.” Harry grabbed the other two containers of water and emptied them in with the rest. He tossed the jugs aside.
“Okay, but how can I help with that?” Eddie pulled a pack of Salems from his pocket, lit one and inhaled deep, blowing jets of smoke through his nose.
“We need your lot,” Harry said, walking up to Eddie and standing only a few feet away. Harry dwarfed him.
He was referring to the parking lot attached to the strip mall Eddie owned in West Elm, the next town over. The property sat directly at the intersection of Route 6 and Route 1A, which made it a straight two-mile shot from West Elm to Heartsridge. Eddie had bought the place ten years back using his retirement savings—his wife Jeannie had just about lost her head when he told her what he’d done—but in the end it had proven to be a sound investment, so transgressions were forgiven. With all the properties rented, it generated a sizable monthly income, enough for Jeannie and Eddie to retire early.
“My lot?”
“Yes, we need your parking lot for extra parking. Tourists are easily spooked, and if they show up in Heartsridge and there isn’t anywhere to park, they’ll just leave and say better luck next time. Especially the ones who are just passing through, and they’re a good portion of it. But if we have your lot we can run a free shuttle between West Elm and Heartsridge. I figure if we advertise off the highway it’ll work out just fine. Gives us the extra space, and we can put a little coin in your pocket for your troubles. It’ll only be for the weekend, of course. We shouldn’t need it Thursday. Usually it’s only locals on opening night.” He slapped Eddie hard on the shoulder, a thick politician’s smile set across his face.
“Aw, Jesus, I can’t do that.” Eddie threw his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his boot. “I have rental agreements with my tenants. I can’t just tell them their customers can’t park there for three days. They could sue me.”
“Oh come on, show a little spine.” Harry turned away, shaking his head and setting his hands on his hips. “Can’t let your tenants run your life. You’ll get three thousand dollars, a grand a day to do nothing. Hell, half the businesses in that mall have booths at our fair this year. It’ll be just as good for them. Besides, we’re family, Eddie. That’s the kind of thing you do for family. Am I right?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t do that, family or not. This is my livelihood. If my tenants leave or sue me, I won’t be able to pay the bills. I’ll be screwed. I got two mortgages to think about.”
Harry gazed off into the distance to where the sun dipped below the horizon, splashing its fading firelight skyward onto what remained of the disappearing world. He brought a hand back to his temples. His jaw muscles bulged and rippled as he clenched his teeth. He was starting to hate Eddie Corbett. He’d always thought the man was a coward, but he was offering money now, real money, and Eddie was turning it down. This disappointed Harry but didn’t necessarily surprise him. If it had been a surprise, Harry wouldn’t have made sure he had a Plan B. He always had a second course of action ready. His ability to see all the angles was, perhaps, second only to his ability to exploit them. It was what made him such a successful politician. He’d offered Eddie the easy way; now it was time for the unpleasant.
Eddie continued. “If I could help you, I would—”
“Bullshit!” Harry spun around, pointing a rigid finger at Eddie. Strands of his dark hair broke loose from their slick hold, falling in sweaty bands across his forehead and around his eyes. “You’re a chicken-shit, Eddie. You always have been and always will be,” he said in a low, hard voice.
Eddie bent backwards as Harry pushed his finger into his face, almost so far back that he looked as though he might stumble and fall on the seat of his pants. “Harry, please… I…” He trailed off.
And then as quickly as Harry Bennett had changed into the wild-haired lunatic, he broke a smile, pulled his hand back, and brushed his hair away from his face. Calmly, he said: “You know what the problem is with cowardly chicken-shits, Eddie? ’Cause I do. They’re weak. Every… last… one of ’em. Weak as sugar-glass. Pathetic.”
“Fuck this and fuck you,” Eddie said. He started to turn back to his truck. “I’m outta here, you prick.”
Harry straightened. “Eddie, family or not, if you turn your back on me I’ll crush your goddamn skull.” The threat was sincere.
Eddie stopped and looked Harry in the eyes. Neither spoke for a few seconds in the hostile silence; they only looked at one another. Harry kept his smile wide.
Eddie broke first. “What do you expect me to do? You drag me all the way out here, ask me to do you one hell of a favor, and then talk to me like that. How would you react?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. No one would ever talk to me like that. I’m not weak like you.” Harry turned away and went back to his car, leaning once more into the backseat. When he turned back around, he was holding two things: a brown burlap sack and a manila envelope. The burlap sack was tied at the top with baler twine. Something inside yowled thinly and tried to push its way out—a hopeless attempt. Harry tossed the sack forward. It landed with a soft thud beside the rusty bucket of water. The thing inside continued to try to escape.
Eddie didn’t move. “What the hell’s in there?” he asked, looking down at the sack. Most of the color had drained from his face as if he were coming to grips with the realization that he might be in trouble.
“I tell you, Eddie, women only want things for the sake of having them. They say they want something, but they don’t want to take care of it. They can be so ungrateful and irresponsible. That’s why I never gave Ali kids, you know that?” Harry said implacably. He moved a few steps closer, but Eddie didn’t seem to notice him. He was still watching, with increasing revulsion on his face, the twitching burlap bag on the ground. “I told you, Ed…” Harry slammed the envelope he was holding in his hand against Eddie’s chest. “Weak.” He laughed. “She’s cute, though. Maybe Jeannie would think so too.”
Eddie’s attention shifted back to himself. He looked down at the envelope pressed against his chest, held in place by the mayor’s burly hand. “What… what is this?”
Harry relaxed his arm, letting the envelope slide. “Open it and find out. But I think by the look on your face right now you already know.”
Eddie caught the package before it fell.
Harry turned his attention to the sack on the ground, kneeling beside it. “I tried to be nice, Eddie.” He pulled a small knife from his
back pocket, grabbed the twisted neck of the burlap bag, and cut the twine. “Just try and remember that come the Christmas party. No need to make things awkward in the family. This is just between you and me… for now.”
While Eddie fumbled with the envelope, trying to open it, Harry reached his hand into the bag, grabbed something furry, and pulled it out. “There you are, my little princess. Just couldn’t keep your legs shut, huh?” He was talking playfully to the white cat as he held it up by the skin of its neck. It twisted lazily in his hand as he brought it near his face and spoke mischievously to it in a strange sort of sick baby-talk. “You were supposed to stay inside, yes you were, but you didn’t, no, you didn’t. No, you went out and screwed some other pussy and got knocked up.” Harry laughed and stood up, cat still in hand. “Looks like you and Lilly here aren’t so different.”
Eddie’s neck was bent down as he shuffled through the stack of pictures he’d pulled from the envelope. He no longer looked scared; he looked guilty. “How did you get these?” he asked, the defeat thick in his voice. When he looked up, Harry was standing beside the rusty bucket of water with a cat clutched in his hand. It made a low, distressed, growling sound as its limbs dangled helplessly paralyzed from its body.
“You don’t get to the Mayor’s Office without having an ear to the ground and an eye in the sky. I’ve known about you and that little piece of ass right there for months now, just never thought I’d ever need anything from you. To be straight with you, I really didn’t want to have to ever use those pictures. A man’s business is his business. It just so happens that my business is more important than you getting your rocks off every Thursday night at eight. If you’d just cooperated it never would’ve come to this.”
The pictures Eddie Corbett held so anxiously in his hands were of him and a young woman, Wynona “Nona” Finn, having a romp in the back room of her hair salon, High Wave. She’d started the business two years before, renting one of the vacant spaces in Eddie’s strip mall. It was a year after her grand opening that Nona’s boyfriend, Glen, cheated on her and ran off with a twenty-something waitress from West Elm. Then it was Eddie who took the vacant space in Nona.
Most of the pictures didn’t show Eddie’s face. But how could they? It was buried between her legs, only black-and-white shots of the back of a bald head. The last three photographs, the ones where Nona was bent over the manicure table and he was pulling at her hair, face turned up in ecstasy, were undeniably Eddie Corbett, though. No getting around that.
“I’ve seen enough. You’re one sick son of a bitch, you know that?” Eddie said, sliding the pictures back into the envelope. “What are you going to do with these?”
“Well,” Harry said, still holding the cat, “that depends entirely on you.” Then in one quick motion he turned, bent to one knee, and plunged the animal toward the bucket of water. Its hind legs kicked for the rim as its tail submerged, but Harry grabbed it tight with his other hand and pushed it under. The cat let out one final yowl, and then it was completely under. The only noise was the occasional clatter of the metal bucket’s handle banging off the side of the container.
Eddie looked on, his face twisted into a look of horror and disgust. “You’re… you’re insane,” he whispered. Not so much to Harry but to himself, as though he were coming to terms with the fact.
“Ohhhh, I don’t think so. I just know how to get what I want. Weak people like you only make it that much easier. Just think, if you could’ve kept your dick in your pants, you wouldn’t be in this mess.” Harry pushed down harder on the cat, the water coming up almost to the folds of his cuffs, small splashes slopping out onto the ground.
“So what are you going to do with these?” Eddie took a cautious step toward Harry.
Harry didn’t respond, only continued to press down on the pregnant cat in the bucket, his body hunched over, bobbing up and down as he mumbled to himself: “I don’t get it. Why doesn’t she ever listen to me? I knew a pet was a bad idea.”
“Harry?” Eddie repeated.
Again, Harry didn’t answer. Then: “Well, what the hell do you think I’m going to do with those pictures? You too stupid to figure out how blackmail works?” He glared up at Eddie, who stumbled backwards a few steps as if shoved.
Harry stood up, shaking his hands off before wiping the remaining water on the seat of his pants. “I want your lot, Eddie. We need it. Now, you can let Heartsridge use it for the festival, or I can leave an envelope like that one on your doorstep for Jeannie to find.”
“I… I—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll do it. You’re a coward, not dumb.”
Eddie looked down at his feet. “What about the negatives? I want those destroyed. I’m assuming these aren’t the only copies.”
“Correct you are, my friend,” Harry said. “And those are safe with me. You can have them after the festival’s over. I have no use for them or you after that.” He reached down and grabbed the cat by the neck, tossing its limp body underneath an old refrigerator beside them. He sighed and kicked the bucket over, spilling the water into the dirt. “I’m telling you, pets are a waste of money.”
Eddie stood there silent.
Harry turned and went back to his car, reaching into the backseat and grabbing one last thing. It was a black bag of trash, closed at the top with a blue rubber band. “Almost forgot the reason I came here,” he said.
Eddie still said nothing, only watched, his face pale.
Harry walked the bag to the mountainous pile of garbage and dropped it gently at the edge. He walked back to his car, got in, and fired up the Eldorado. As he was backing out, he said, “C’mon, Ed, everything will be fine. Cheer up.” Then he laughed and sped off.
Driving toward the exit, plumes of dust twisting up behind his car, he could just barely see the silhouette of Eddie Corbett in his rearview mirror, standing there, slouching, and slowly moping back to his truck. Then the dust closed in like a curtain, and Eddie was gone.
CHAPTER 2
The killer drove a truck, a ’71 Ford he’d stolen up north. It was a hard-lived machine—sun-cracked red paint, rust-spotted chrome bumpers, bald tires. The cab had the baked-in smell of vinyl rubber and motor oil. Raw smells of sweat and grit. He sat parked in the back of the empty truck stop with the engine off, smoking a Marlboro. It was night, and rain poured down in fat droplets, sheeting his windshield like crystal syrup, beating hard off the truck’s roof in drunken time. He was waiting for the man who was going to exit the bathroom at the far end of the lot.
He’d followed him south since the gas station in Hanover, New Hampshire, pulling to the side of the road and dousing his lights when the man turned into the rest stop. He’d watched through the sparse divide of pines that separated the highway from the parking lot as the man exited the blue Pinto and walked into the bathrooms of the building lettered MASSACHUSETTS STATE HIGHWAY INFORMATION.
Once the man had gone inside, the killer brought his truck into the rest area and drove to the back of the lot, shutting off the engine. After making sure there weren’t any other cars, he pulled a small switchblade from his pocket and hopped out of the truck. Sticking to the tree line, eyes monitoring the bathroom door, he made his way to the man’s car. Sticking the blade in the tread, he flattened the front right tire. Puncturing the side would look too suspicious, too intentional, and it might spook the guy too much. No mistakes, he reminded himself.
Going back to the tree line, he returned to his truck, lit a cigarette and waited. The Pinto had immediately started to lean on its crippled leg. Less than a minute later, the tire had gone completely flat. Now the killer continued to watch, whistling softly to take his mind off his hammering heart, flicking the blade of the knife open and closed, open and closed, over and over again. Click-click, click-click, click-click. He loved that sound.
This would be his fourth time, and he was finally starting to rid his craft of the sloppiness that’d plagued his first three outings. The times before had gone reasonably well
but not perfectly. There had been little things he’d forgotten, small oversights that left a lingering bitterness in the back of his mind: the gun getting caught in his coat pocket as he’d tried to pull it, leaving cigarette butts behind, standing too close and getting blood spray on his clothes. He tried to forget about those things, promising to learn from his mistakes, apply the lesson and move forward. Growth. Progress. But many nights the mistakes found him startled awake in a cold sweat, claustrophobic thoughts of cement walls and cold steel bars racing through his head. That was no good. It was a cancerous, slow rot from the inside out. The memories of his kills were infected with these small degrees of incompetence, thwarting any attempts to fully enjoy his work. And what was the point of it all if he couldn’t even enjoy it?
It’d been almost two months since he’d shot Stephen, the hitchhiker from Vermont, and according to the news, the case remained open without a single lead. The same went for the other two. That had to mean something. He couldn’t be all that incompetent if he’d managed to go this long without so much as a sniff in his direction. It’d been almost a year since he started killing. With three victims under his belt, he was moving beyond amateur, and so far, the police hadn’t even connected the murders. Or if they had, they were keeping silent about it, which more than likely meant they didn’t know much of anything. So why couldn’t he enjoy his work? Why the sour aftertaste when he was so sure it should taste sweet? It didn’t seem fair.
Perhaps it was the possibility of getting caught, the possibility that deep down he knew his urges were becoming more powerful than any logic or rules he could put in place. No matter how many lessons he applied, his poor impulse control led to hastily made decisions. No one could cover every minute detail. Eventually he might slip up. That remained the eventual truth. He could feel his handle on the darkness inside him slipping. Like a wild horse spooked and charging, the illusion of control was quickly disappearing.
There had been a time when he actually could stop himself, though. He’d fought the urges all through college. It wasn’t until nine years after he’d graduated that the long, aimless drives around New England started. Sometimes he would just get in his car and drive north. Six hours would pass in what seemed like the blink of an eye, and he would be at the Canadian border. Then he would turn around, head home, and do it again the next day. Soon he began looking for hitchhikers, not really planning on going through with anything but seeing how close he could bring himself to that point of no return, sometimes just playing through scenarios in his mind, sometimes actually picking up strangers, driving them ten or fifteen miles, and then dropping them off, the whole time feeling the cold steel of his gun pressed against his stomach or sitting in his pocket. Eventually he got bored though, and the urges, like any compulsion, demanded harder stimulation—the good stuff, the real stuff. He finally saw no good reason he should have to hold back any longer. But he was certain this was his choice. He didn’t have to start killing. He just didn’t see why he shouldn’t. He could control it if he wanted to, sure.
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