The Undertaker

by William Brown

  From the rear, Doug's house looked much like his neighbors, except none of his lights were on. He had a stout brick garage with an overhead door, and a tall board fence that spanned the gap to the garage next door. The fence had a thick wooden gate. Along the fence ran a line of dented metal garbage cans, but there was nothing that offered a hand or even a toehold to scale the fence. Even if you did manage to climb it, Doug had added a looping double spool of razor wire along the top.

  Sandy stood in the alley and looked up at the tall barrier. “Jeez, and I thought you were paranoid,” she said glumly.

  “Good fences make good neighbors.“

  “Who said that? Carl Sandburg or O. J. Simpson?” she asked, pushing on the fence and the gate, sizing them up. “Your surfer boy built himself a good one.” She stepped over to one of the garbage cans. Rummaging inside, she pulled out several sections of newspaper. “I think it's time the “Fuckin’ Wallendas” made an encore,” she said.

  “You can't get over that thing,” I tried to tell her.

  “We lived in a second floor apartment and my old man never let us out on school nights. I learned the fine art of escape and evasion from my older sister Louise. Piece of cake, Talbott, let's go.”

  She draped her camera and the big shoulder bag around my neck and pushed me back against the wooden fence with my hands knit together. As light as she was, I barely felt her weight as she stepped from my hands to my shoulder and draped the newspaper across the razor wire. “Good thing I changed into the shorts,” she said as she looked down at me. “I wouldn't want some pervert looking up my skirt.” She dropped back down, “Okay, one, two…” She rocked backward, and “three!” I tossed her upward and she soared effortlessly over the razor wire, clearing it by at least a foot. She dropped out of sight on the other side, but I heard no screams or snapping of bones, only a soft “Thump.”

  Moments later, the bolt on the gate rattled and she pulled it open, dusting off her hands with a flourish as she welcomed me inside the dark rear yard. “Warning: performed by professional acrobat. Do not try this at home,” she said with a big grin on her face.

  “Show off,” I mumbled.

  “Show off? I remind you that you would be standing out in the alley picking your nose right now if you hadn't brought me along.”

  “You're lucky you didn't break your butt!” I whispered.

  “And you'll be lucky if you don't get another bruise later.”

  “Hush.” I put my finger to her lips and we stood listening, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. She started kissing my finger, running her tongue up it, and putting it in her mouth until I pulled it away and glared at her. “Will you stop that!” I whispered.

  “You didn't complain when we were on the train. Then again… maybe that wasn't your finger, was it?” she whispered with a gleam in her eye.

  Doug's back yard was as dark as a cave and the damp air slowly came alive with the sounds and smells of a warm summer night. Rich and earthy, still wet after the rain, I smelled roses, lily of the valley, and honeysuckle. I heard mosquitoes buzzing and the flapping wings of a large moth. Too much. Too little. And very quiet. Slowly, the outline of the yard emerged from the shadows, blacks on darker blacks and grays on darker grays.

  The garage took up almost half the area between the fences, but there was a tool shed off to the right and a cracked, uneven sidewalk leading to the back door of the house. I took Sandy's hand and we walked slowly to the wooden rear stairs. They creaked as we stepped lightly up the half-dozen risers to the covered back porch. There was a window on each side of the rear door. I tried to look into the dark rooms, but I couldn't see a thing. I opened the screen door and squinted through the small glass panes in the kitchen door. That was just as fruitless, so I turned my attention to the locks. One was set in the doorknob and he had two dead bolts in the door. No hope there. I looked closely at the door and window frames. There were no electric contacts or wires from a burglar alarm system, but I knew he had one. I pulled out my handkerchief, placed it against one of the small panes of glass in the door, and smacked it with my elbow. In the still, damp air of the back yard, it sounded like a car crash, but it probably wasn't loud enough for anyone to hear next door or out in the street. Not in these old buildings. The front and rear walls could stop a cannon ball. I slipped my hand through the broken window frame, intending to open the door as Sandy reached out and turned the doorknob. To my surprise, the door swung open. The damned thing hadn't even been locked.

  “Men!” she whispered in my ear. “You always gotta break something, don't you?”

  “Slow down!” I whispered, trying to hold her back, but she ignored me as usual and stepped through the open doorway into the kitchen. The best I could do was grab her by the seat of her shorts and stop her from going any father.

  “Have we been formally introduced?” she asked as I let go of her rear end. “Yeah, come to think of it, I guess we have, haven't we.”

  The room was very dark. There was barely enough dim light coming through the draped rear windows to tell me we were in the kitchen, but not much more. Her hand ran along the wall, searching for a light switch, but I seized her wrist. “No, wait,” I said as I heard the panicked skittering of sharp nails on the tile kitchen floor. Three terrified balls of fur dashed past us and tore out the back door, screaming like banshees.

  “What the hell was that?” Sandy asked.

  “Doug's cats, I hope.” Without seeing them, I knew one was a big, black Persian, fat as a turkey, and the other two were Burmese, one white and one gray.

  “Something sure spooked them.”

  She was right about that, and there was a damp, foul smell in the place. I wasn't sure what it was and I wasn't sure I wanted to know, either. We stood there in silence, listening to our own hearts pound, but nothing else came out of the dark at us. The townhouse was as silent as a tomb. Still, something had terrified the cats.

  “Stay there,” I told her as I inched forward, reaching out, navigating through the dark room with my fingertips. Fortunately, these old houses were not large. I bumped into the kitchen table and then my hand found the counter top and the stove on the far side. To my right, the darker, rectangular shape of a doorway emerged from the gloom. I figured it led to the front rooms. I took two steps toward the door when my foot bumped into something large and soft lying in the middle of the floor. I lost my balance and fell forward on my hands and knees.

  “Are you all right?” Sandy quickly asked.

  “Yeah. Have you got a match?”

  She rummaged around inside her big shoulder bag. “Here. You want them?”

  “No. I don't want to move. Light one, but cup your hand around it.”

  She struck the match across the emery paper once, twice, then a third time before it lit, but by then I had already guessed what was lying next to me.

  “Oh my God!” she said as she dropped the match on the tile floor. Its dim yellow glow quickly went out, but not soon enough. In that split second I saw a dead, battered, and half-naked body lying on its back, tied to a kitchen chair. The face was bloody and swollen beyond recognition, its eyes staring up at the ceiling, but I knew it was Doug.

  Sandy had seen it too. She quickly turned away and I heard the sound of gagging and coughing as she threw up in the corner.

  There was nothing to say. I took the matches from her hand and lit another, forcing myself to take a closer look as a towering rage grew inside me. They had used coat hangers to tie his legs and arms to the chair and the wires had cut deep into his skin as he struggled. There was a kitchen towel jammed in his mouth and enough bruises and burn marks to show that Doug had died slow and hard. Worse still, there was a second body in the room, sprawled on the floor near the sink. It was a woman. She was naked and as badly beaten as Doug was. Her face was turned away from me, but I knew it was Sharon. It took a real sadist to beat and torture two people like that and a real twisted mind to order it. Not that Tinkerton would have come here
and gotten his own fingers bloody. He preferred rubber gloves, a clean, white surgical gown, and classical music when he worked, so the kitchen of an old brownstone would be far too crude for his tastes. That was the moment I knew I could never rest until I killed the man, with my bare hands if I had to.

  I was trembling, my legs shaking, but I forced myself to my feet. “Come on,” I said hoarsely as I took Sandy by the hand and dragged her out the door.

  She seemed to be in a daze as she looked back to the bodies. “You… you aren't going to leave them in there like that, are you?”

  “There's nothing we can do for them now and if we don't get out of here we'll be next.” I pulled out my shirttail and wiped off the doorknob and the wall where she touched it. We turned and ran down the rear stairs hand-in-hand, trying to put the horror of the kitchen behind us. When we reached the rear gate, I heard Sandy's pained voice call to me as she tugged on my arm. “Slow down, damn it. If I fall, I really will break my butt!”

  She was right. I slowed down and we stopped at the gate to take some deep breaths and clear our heads. “We'll head back downtown,” I told her. “I need some time to think.”

  Her hand was still gripped in mine as we turned east up the alley and jogged slowly away. Side-by-side, our footsteps were finally in synch as they splashed and echoed off the old, worn asphalt. We had gone no more than a hundred feet when I heard the unmistakable “Pop! Pop! Pop!” of a silenced pistol firing at us from the shadows further up the alley. I heard one shot, then another and a third, as the slugs smacked into the heavy wooden garage door behind us like a bass drum. I didn't stop to think. I wrapped my arms around Sandy, picked her up, and dived blindly over a row of trashcans that stood against the brick wall to our left. The three shots had not come all that close, but I knew there were more bullets where those came from.

  I twisted in the air as I went over the cans and landed on my back with Sandy on top. I got a sharp elbow in the ribs for my trouble, but I kept rolling until I had her jammed up against the wall and she couldn't get up, which was good. I turned my head and looked out through a gap in the cans. Across the alley, the dim outline of a man stepped from the shadows two houses ahead of us. I couldn't make out his features, but he had a pistol in his hand with a fat, ugly silencer screwed onto the barrel. A silencer? That ruled out the cops and the Neighborhood Watch Committee.

  He came toward us in a low crouch, taking one small, hesitant step at a time as if he was trying to figure out his next move. Not that there was much we could do to stop him. We were safe for the moment, hidden in the deep shadows behind the cans, but we were trapped. I thought of making a run for it to draw the goon's attention away from Sandy but I knew that wouldn't accomplish much either. After he killed me, he would come back and do her. I looked through the crack again and saw the goon still hadn't come much more than halfway across the alley. That was something. He missed with his first three shots and that was something else. I couldn't see his face, but maybe he was scared of us, too. Maybe he was new at this. Maybe he wasn't sure if we were armed. Maybe there was a river of cold sweat running down his back just like mine. Maybe, but he kept edging closer, swinging the pistol back and forth.

  “Ay! Give it up, guy,” he growled in a nervous, bass voice. “Youse two can come on out, I won't shoot ya, honest. I just wanna talk.”

  “That's no Fed,” I heard Sandy mumble.

  “Shut up!” I whispered, pushing her against the wall.

  The goon was getting frustrated. He raised the pistol and shot twice more. One bullet slammed into the battered metal trashcans next to me with a loud, 'Pa-loonk!' and the other exploded on the soft brick of the garage wall behind us, showering us with red dust and chips of cracked clay. Two more shots and two more misses. That made five in all, but he wasn't likely to miss with very many more.

  Sandy jabbed her elbow into my ribs again and tried to get up, but I shoved her back down on the muddy ground and leaned on her. “You son of a bitch!” she mumbled into the wall, furious at me, but I kept her there.

  Fortunately, the gunman wasn't very bright. He could have ended it quickly if he had circled around the cans and come in behind us, but he didn't do that. And by not doing it with speed and determination, he gave us a chance. Quickly and quietly, I drew my legs beneath me and pushed myself up into a low crouch. He had a gun, which was his edge, but I was wound tighter than a Swiss watch. All I had to do was picture the bloody carnage back in the kitchen to flash back into a searing rage, but I needed something more. Something. Anything! My hands skimmed across the rough pavement of the alley searching for a weapon, or something sharp or heavy that might make a dent in the goon's skull. Other than a rotten head of lettuce and a bent soup ladle, the pickings behind the trashcans were slim.

  When we didn't come out after the last two shots, the goon got really pissed. “I'm warnin' youse!” he threatened, but was cut short by the crash and clatter of an empty can tipping over across the alley and another screeching stampede of cats. When they dashed out Doug's kitchen door, they must have run through the back yard into the alley and the goon's gunshots spooked them all over again. They hissed and howled, tipping the can over. It went one way and the lid rattled the other and that spooked the goon. He turned and began popping shots at anything that moved. Just when I thought I would have to take him on with nothing more than a soup ladle, an angry, fifteen-pound ball of fur, teeth, and sharp claws skittered around the corner and bowled into me.

  It was Doug's big, black Persian. I dug my fingers deep into the fur on its back and picked it up. The terrified Persian screeched, its sharp teeth bared and claws flailing the night air as I sprang over the top of the packing crate like a jack-in-the-box. The goon was not more than five feet away as I heaved the cat at him like a medicine ball and with that first quick look, I knew I had him. His eyes went round as saucers as he saw those teeth and claws flying at him. If he had the presence of mind to turn the gun on me, ignore the cat, and pull the trigger, I would be dead, but he did not do that. He couldn't. All he saw was a ball of razor blades coming at him and that sealed his fate. He froze. I may have gotten low marks for form, but a perfect ten for accuracy. The big Persian hit the guy flush in the chest. In that instant I had no doubt the cat understood what had happened to Doug and who was responsible. With claws flashing like four chain saws, it dug in and ran up the goon's chest, face, and over the top of his head, sending blood, strips of cloth, and flesh flying. The goon screamed and stumbled backward, using both hands to fend off the cat. His pistol clattered on the rough concrete and I knew he had forgotten all about me.

  But I had not forgotten about him. He stood whimpering, his hands covering his face as blood ran down the front of his shirt. I hit him with a roundhouse right, putting my shoulder into it and following through. That should have been enough to put anyone down for the count, but this guy didn't want to cooperate. He staggered backward, shook his head, and roared with pain, then lumbered toward me again, wiping the blood out of his eyes, trying to focus them on me. With the image of that kitchen floor seared on my brain, I wasn't running. He wasn't running either, and that was just fine with me. I wanted something to hit.

  “Come on,” I said as I squared around and motioned to him. “You want some more?” That only got him angrier. I put up my fists and circled him to the right as he came at me in a bull-rush. His right fist caught me flush on the shoulder and the left side of my body went numb. That was when a dark blur flashed past me. Spinning and grunting like a 100-pound dervish, Sandy gave the goon a lightning fast karate kick to the forehead. She had small feet packed inside those Reeboks. The kick snapped his head back like a hard, straight jab from a middleweight and stood him upright. I remembered what those feet had done to Toothpick on the El platform in Chicago and this clown didn't stand a chance. It was all over in a few seconds and I hadn't even moved.

  The goon tried to clear his head, but Sandy gave him a second kick to the face and a third, followed by a sweeping
smash to the kneecap that buckled his leg, a straight fist to the throat, and a hard kick to the groin. That one dropped him to his knees, groaning. With his head finally down at her level, she finished him off with a spinning heel to the temple. His eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled sideways on the ground like a felled oak, out cold. She stood over him breathing hard, bobbing up and down. “Come on you turkey!” she screamed, daring him to get back up, but he never did. Lucky for him. She was a lethal little package riding a huge adrenaline high and I had no doubt she would have killed him.

  “Hey.” I got to my feet and laid my hand on her shoulder. “You won.”

  Eyes wild, she spun around and would have kicked me too if I hadn't backed up. For that instant, I wasn't certain she recognized me and I wanted no part of those size-six feet or those delicate little fists. I raised my hands in mock surrender and smiled. “Sandy, remember me? I'm on your side.”

  Finally, she blinked and looked down at the unconscious goon. “Jeez!” she giggled with an embarrassed smile. “Did I do that?”

  “It must have been something he said.” I bent over and felt around the dark alley, trying to find his pistol. My fingertips skimmed across the rough concrete, knowing it had to be there somewhere. Finally, I felt the barrel in one of the deep ruts. Picking it up, I brushed the dirt off and slipped it into the waistband of my pants, as she stepped behind the line of cans and rattled around back there in the dark. She let lose with an angry moan as she came out cradling her broken camera in her hands.

  “Look what you did!” She glared at me accusingly.

  “Me? What did I do?”