Midnight Lullaby

by James D F Hannah

  "You shaving your hands?"

  "Just my palms. I’m single and I get lonely."

  Simms looked at Woody. "And who are you?"

  I'm the comedic sidekick," Woody said. "Name's Woody."

  "That a first name or a last name?"

  "Name's Woody," he said again.

  They walked us to the front porch. "When was the last time you saw Earl Teller?" Simms said. He pointed at the smoldering automotive remains in the driveway. "I’m asking because that car belongs to him."

  "It’s a lovely car," I said.

  "With a body burned up in the trunk. Body's more cooked than the car is. We're pretty sure it's Teller's body." He took a wallet out of his coat pocket. "Teller's wallet, with his ID. Someone chucked it into Walters' front yard before they doused the car in gas and set the whole thing on fire about three a.m. this morning."

  "You don't need to say 'this morning' when you say 'three a.m.'" I said. "The 'a.m.' gives that part away. It's like saying 'ATM machine,' because the 'M' already stands for 'machine'—"

  Simms propped himself against the porch, arms folded across his chest. "Malone, my deputy already wants to snap you in two, half on sheer principle and half out of sheer boredom, so I'd recommend you keep your mouth shut for a while."

  I nodded. "Sound advice.”

  Woody said, "You getting anything out of Richie Walters about this?"

  "He claims nothing but abject ignorance, which isn’t hard to believe," Simms said. "Says the noise woke him up. He saw the car on fire in his driveway and called 911." Simms adjusted his stance. "You have anything to do with his alleged assault the other day? He says he was robbed, but never bothered to a report."

  I smiled. “While I'd love to tune that motherfucker like a piano, I regret to say none of that was on me. But it's an odd thing, how he had this mysterious beating and then someone burns a car in his driveway with a white supremacist dead in the trunk already.”

  "Once may argue someone's trying to send him a message."

  "A telegram is a message, Sheriff; you burn someone alive, you're taking it to another level."

  Simms furrowed his eyebrows. "Why d'you say that?"

  I realized I'd stepped right into it.

  "Say what?"

  "You said they burned someone alive; why you say it like that? He might have been dead when they shoved him in the trunk."

  I heard the seconds tick by with every heartbeat pulsing in my ears.

  "I'm spitballing here, Sheriff. He might have been alive when they set the car on fire. When you do shit like this, you might as well go big."

  Simms nodded. "You still looking into the Bobbi Fisher thing?"

  I took a deep breath. Simms wasn't stupid. It would have been easier if he was. I didn't know how long I wanted to keep compounding lies to him.

  "I'm poking around at it," I said.

  "Found out anything new?"

  "Not really. Things sort of petered out."

  Simms studied me for a while. Finally, he said, "You want to go inside, have a talk with Walters?"

  I rubbed my hands together. My left hand ached sharply and suddenly. I looked at it and stared at the empty spot where my finger should have been. For a moment, there wasn’t anything but this hand that felt like mine, but it wasn’t, and somehow it had detached from me, and I stared at it, wondering where it came from.

  Noises swirled in my ears. I thought they were human voices, but I couldn’t process them. Something flicked at my earlobe, and it hurt. I jerked and remembered where I was. Woody pointed at Simms.

  “Sheriff’s talking to you,” he said.

  Simms stared at me like I was a science fair project, or an exhibit at the zoo.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “I’m fucking awesome,” I said. “Let’s go chat Richie the fuck up.”

  35

  Walters' house was full of bad art, wall-to-wall carpet, and antique family photos that weren’t really his family. We passed a rec room with a pool table with a dark green, unscarred felt surface, and deer heads hanging on the wall.

  The living room had a 70-inch flat screen, overstuffed chairs, and James Patterson novels on the shelves. Mrs. Walters was seated in a chair, dressed a pink running suit, her big blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. She looked as though she’d been crying for a while. Walters was at a bar, pouring whiskey into a tumbler filled with ice. His bruises had faded to yellow, and he was less swollen, but he still moved stiffly, like his clothing was too tight in all the wrong places.

  When we walked in, Mrs. Walters’ attention went straight to Simms. His body language loosened, and his eyes softened. She put her arms around him and sniffled.

  Simms cradled her close to him. It wasn't impossible to imagine them years ago, still in love. It was almost too intimate to observe, and I tried to find something else in the room to look at.

  "The state police are almost done taking pictures, and then they'll haul it away," Simms said.

  Rachel rested her head on his shoulder. "Who does something like that? Something so sick."

  Walters laughed. "Shit happens all the time in the real world, Rachel," he said, taking a drink of his whiskey. "Junkies and meth heads and liberals, they see what you've got and they think they can scare you into giving it to them."

  All of that relaxation in Simms vanished at the sound of Walters' voice, and Simms broke away from his ex, his body readying for a fight. His hands curled into fists. Tendons stretched taut along his neck.

  "So what you're saying, Mr. Walters," Simms said, “is you don't feel that this incident is related to your work?"

  "Fuck no. People know who I am, and all they're looking for is an easy way to make money. They set stuff on fire in your driveway and think you'll stay awake all night with worry. The hell with that. We used to set couches on fire in Morgantown because WVU won a football game." He motioned toward the front of the house with the hand holding the whiskey glass. Globs of liquid splashed out of the glass and splattered across the carpet. I guessed this wasn’t his first drink of the morning. "They're gonna have to do a hell of a lot better than that."

  Rachel Walters seemed to realize there were people in the room other than her husband and Simms. She tilted her head as she looked at me, like a puppy struggling to understand a new trick. "You're the gentleman who brought Dickie home that night?"

  I couldn’t help but smile. "'Dickie'?" I pointed at Walters. "You’re 'Dickie'? Are you ‘Little Dickie’ when the shower gets cold?"

  Rachel Walters shook her head. Confusion settled in like morning fog. "You said you weren't a friend of his," she said to me. To Simms, she said, "Matty, what's going on?"

  Simms looked at Thompson. "Carl, why don't you take Mrs. Walters to the station, maybe stop on the way and get a bite to eat or some coffee—"

  She looked at Matt with a nine-year-old’s version of anger. “Stop trying to protect me, Matty.”

  "'Matty'?" I said. It kept getting better.

  "Rachel, please, I'm just—"

  Walters sneered and dropped his voice an octave. "'Yes, Rachel, I'm trying to be the hero, Rachel.'" He topped off his drink and emptied half of the glass in a long swallow. "'I'm the sheriff. I've got to be the hero.'"

  "Mr. Walters—" Simms said, not even bothering to hide the edge.

  "Suck my dick, Sheriff, you and your ‘Mr. Walters’ shit. That you used to fuck my wife doesn't mean you get to call her 'Rachel' and then I'm 'Mr. Walters.' I hear how you sound when you say it. Like you found gum and dog shit on the bottom on your shoe." He pointed at me. "And what is this asshole doing here? He almost assaulted me outside of my office only a month ago. I'll bet he had something to do with this bullshit, anyway."

  I looked at Walters. "You knew Earl Teller. You were doing business with the National Brotherhood."

  Walters added more whiskey to his glass. His hand was getting shakier. He kept his head down, eyes away from me.

  Simms rested a hand on Rachel Wa
lters’ shoulder. "Let Carl take you to get lunch, then go to the station while we sort through some things. Get away from here."

  She shook her head. "I'm staying with Dickie."

  "For fuck's sake, Rachel, just go already," Walters said. "He's ready to fuck you where you're sitting, and I'm not in the mood to watch."

  Simms put an arm around her and leaned in and whispered in her ear. She listened, nodded, stood, and walked over next to Carl. "I guess I'm all yours, big man," she said, mustering up a smile.

  Thompson returned the smile. He looked human, and not like the shaved gorilla/Rottweiler hybrid he usually looked like. "My pleasure," he said. He extended an arm, and she took it and they walked out together.

  Simms crossed the room and shut the door and turned the lock. The sound of the bolt clicking echoed.

  To Simms, I said, "Can I hit him?"

  Simms shrugged. "I don't even know what you're talking about."

  Walters didn't have time to respond. By the time I reached him and he realized what was about to happen, he had set his glass down and raised his left arm in defense.

  I caught him with a right cross that left his eyes blank and him rolling onto his heels and hitting the built-in bookshelf behind him and sliding to the floor. His head slumped forward and a trickle of blood and drool dribbled from a corner of his mouth.

  I gave him a backhanded bitch slap across his face. His back pressed against the shelf, and he struggled to drag himself away from me.

  "Sheriff!" he said.

  Simms perused the bookshelves on the other side of the room with Woody. Woody pulled a book and showed it to Simms.

  "Haven't read it," Simms said. "Any good?"

  "Very," Woody said.

  I grabbed Walters and pulled him to his feet and shoved my left hand into his face. "You see this? Those Nazi assholes did this." I let go of him and he relaxed. I drove my right fist into the stomach. He doubled over, and I pounded him upside the head. He screamed and grabbed the back of his skull. I pulled him upright and got close enough to him I could smell every drink he’d consumed that morning. "They cut off my goddamn finger because I got involved with your stupid ass."

  Simms froze and stared at me. "He lost his finger?" he said. He sounded shocked because, well, who wouldn’t, you hear shit like that?

  "Yeah," Woody said. He was still looking over the library. "Nasty shit. What do you think of Flannery O'Connor?"

  I took Walters by the hair. I might have accidentally on purpose thumped his head against the bookshelf. A Stephen King tome came loose and fell on his head. It was one you could use as a doorstop, and it landed with a thud across the top of his skull. He gave a pitiful yell. I knocked his head across the books again.

  "I didn’t 'lose' a finger," I said. “It didn’t fucking fall off.” I flicked at the inside of Walters’ eye, and he jumped a little, and I knocked his head into the shelf again. “My finger was fucking cut off by the assholes you work with. You opted to fuck the high priestess of racist asshole crackers, and it has dragged you into a meth operation, money laundering, gun running—"

  From across the room, Simms said, "He did what the fuck?"

  I looked over my shoulder at Simms, held a good grip on Walters, and said, "The counselor here helped the Brotherhood launder millions in meth money they're using to buy guns so they can start a race war. Compound that with the Brotherhood's belief that Bobbi Fisher stole three hundred thousand of those dollars, which you and I both know is high-grade bullshit since you stole it."

  Simms walked around the peripheral of the room and moved into my line of sight. It was difficult to focus on much that wasn’t Walters at that point.

  "That changes shit," Simms said. “You're talking about federal-level crimes. We need the Feds on this."

  "Awesome," I said. I kicked Walters in the stomach. He grunted and balled his body up, as if he could vanish into nothingness.

  "Stop fucking hitting me. Please." Walters' words came out as wet little sobs.

  "Have they moved Teller's car yet?" I said to Simms.

  "No," he said. There was a measure of caution in his voice. "Why?"

  I took hold of Walters and pushed him toward the door. Simms stepped in front of me.

  "Where are you taking him?" he said.

  "He needs fresh air," I said, bum-rushing past him.

  Walters relaxed his body into dead weight. I braced myself to keep him standing, grabbed him with both hands, and kept moving toward the front door, using momentum to propel him forward. He screamed something about suing the county and the sheriff's department and me and anyone else he could think of. That was when his head brushed against the door frame hard enough to make a crack, and he yelled about that instead.

  The outside air was crisp and harsh. As I brought Walters down the front porch steps he decided his crotch hitting each step wasn't what he wanted, so he gave up on passive resistance and pushed himself to his feet.

  The deputies and state troopers looked at us with confused expressions. Simms was on the porch and yelled, "Stand down, guys! Stand down!"

  I shoved Walters toward the open trunk of Teller's burned-out wreck and held him there. Teller's body looked worse than it had the night before. Bits of charred flesh clung to bone burned black. The heat from the fire had scorched clothing straight onto the skeleton, leaving rags hanging from his ribcage. The smell was a combination of burned flesh and rotten meat and piss, the stench shoving itself into the recesses of your nostrils, finding a place to burrow in deep and not give up.

  "That was Earl Teller," I said. "He made the mistake of telling me the Brotherhood's business, so they doused him in gas and set him on fire, and once he was done burning to death, they pissed on his smoldering corpse. Want to guess who had front-row seats to that Rob Zombie nightmare right before they chopped his finger off? I'll save you the effort; it was me, motherfucker. Do you even give a good goddamn why? They were proving a point." I pushed his head down until his face was almost pressed against the remains of Earl Teller. “The point was they want their goddamn money."

  Walters flailed and screamed and broke free from me. He trembled, covered in sweat, his eyes wide and wild. "Goddammit, I didn't take the money, I swear to fuckin' Christ, I didn't—" He tripped over his own feet and landed on his ass. "They asked me where the money was and I said I didn't know. That’s the honest to God truth, I swear on my fucking life."

  Simms watched from the edge of the driveway. The deputies stood behind him, waiting to be told what to do, clueless as hell in the meanwhile.

  "What the hell happened, Malone?" Simms said.

  I told him about the meth house and Monica Mayhew in bullet points. As I talked, his expression would change to a new level of disbelief, and he'd run his hand through his hair and shake his head and mutter an obscenity and then tell me to keep talking.

  “Why am I just finding out Bobbi Fisher is alive?” he said. “Biggest news in this county in months, and she shows back up on your doorstep and you don’t think to tell anyone?”

  Dickie—or Richie, or whatever the fuck people wanted to call him—had passed out in the driveway. None of the deputies bothered to move him. He snored next to a burned-out wreck with well-done human remains in the trunk.

  Simms' radio burst to life. "Ten-double zero, ten-double zero!" a voice said. "Officer down! Officer down!"

  Simms snapped the radio off his belt. "This is Sheriff Simms. Report."

  It was Thompson. "There was an ambush, Matt! They shot me, and they got Rachel!"

  Simms told a deputy to stay at Walters' house while the rest of the deputies and state police officers headed to the hospital. He had us drag Walters back into the house and handcuff him somewhere so he couldn't get anywhere. Walters was unconscious the entire time, so we didn’t worry about being gentle. Woody said the bathroom seemed the most merciful place, since he was likely to have to piss or puke when he woke up, so we cuffed him to the pipes under the sink, then followed Simms.
r />   Woody drove. I tapped the fingers I had left on the dashboard. I thought of sitting in a thunderstorm, in a pool of my own blood on the side of the highway, and the rush of mortality that overwhelms you. It's the fucking cliched realization that all it takes is one person, one second, the wrong place, the wrong time, and it all changes ...

  Woody’s cell phone rang. He fished it from his pocket and answered.

  "Hello? Hey ... wait, wait, calm down. Take a deep breath. What's wrong? What did he say?" There was a long pause. "Fuck. No. We're on the way to the hospital, and then we'll be there. Do not go anywhere. I know. I know. But stay where you are. No, we're both fine. But you need to stay right where you are. Promise me. Promise me this, Bobbi. I'll call you once things settle. Henry and I, we'll take care of this. It'll be okay."

  Woody hung up the phone. "Mitch Fisher called Bobbi. Someone grabbed her girls at school."

  36

  Simms was in the Parker County General ER waiting area when we walked in, drinking coffee from a paper cup and staring at his shoes like there were answers to the question of life on them.

  "How's he doing?" I said.

  "He's alive," Simms said. “Two shots to the chest area, but he was conscious when they brought him in. He's in surgery now."

  Simms had stayed on the radio with Thompson until paramedics showed up. It went down outside the sheriff's department as Thompson had pulled into his spot and had gone around to open the door for Rachel. A pickup pulled up and two men in masks and carrying AR-15s jumped out. Thompson pulled his service weapon and opened fire as he tried to push Rachel back into the car, but the driver swung the semi-auto around and fired off half a clip. Several rounds nailed Thompson in the chest and he collapsed onto the sidewalk. Rachel screamed for Thompson, and then for Simms, as they shoved her into the pickup and drove away.

  “Somehow, this whole thing managed to become fuckered up,” Simms said.

  That was when we told him about Bobbi and her daughters. He screamed and threw the paper cup across the waiting area, splattering coffee across the wall. The nurses stopped what they were doing and stared as Simms glowered and stormed out of the waiting area.