by D. M. Pulley
“What’s a junk train?” She followed his gaze out toward the tracks.
“Scrap metal, produce, livestock, that sort of thing. Or are they all tankers?”
“We get everything through here. It’s a hub. Trains roll through every hour.” She started to understand his thinking.
Jimmy nodded and opened the car door. “Let’s hope you’re right. I hear one coming.”
“Where are we going?” Kris scrambled out after him.
“We gotta get back to Cleveland. They can’t prove a thing if they can’t ID me.”
“They’re going to find the car.”
“It’s not illegal to park here, is it?” Jimmy threw her bags over the chain-link fence and climbed up after them.
“No. But . . .” She stopped at the rusted links, debating what to do. An eighteen-wheeler roared past on the road out front, blind to them standing there in the shrubs. Ben would be furious with her. The entire town would be in an uproar. She could picture Troy loading up his truck with guns and tearing ass all the way to Cleveland.
“But nothing. We’ll work it out, but we’ve got to move. Now.”
Kris nodded and hopped the fence.
Jimmy picked up the bags and patted her shoulder. “It’s not a felony to ditch a car. All they can give you for it is a ticket. You’re a grown woman. You can leave town whenever you want to.”
“But isn’t it illegal to stow away on a train?”
“Not if you don’t get caught.” Jimmy led her over the tracks, eying both directions. A rusted boxcar leaned against an abutment with its door open. He grabbed her hand and dragged her across two sets of tracks and up into the open container. “This track doesn’t look like it’s even patrolled.”
“How do you even know which train is going where?” Kris hissed and backed up into a corner of the steel box. It smelled of moss and old onions.
“Any train pointed east should hit Cleveland. All the major lines go through.” Jimmy kept his eyes on the tracks. “Besides, there’s signs.”
“What do you mean ‘signs’?”
“In the old days, hobos would tag trains and stops with glyphs. You know, marks to help each other.” He pointed to the graffiti on the walls of the boxcar. The marks looked like nothing but a collection of scribbles to Kris. “See. This car came from Cleveland.”
“What are you saying? Hobos spray-painted the car?”
“Nobody calls themselves ‘hobos’ anymore, but they still hop trains.”
“Why?”
“Free ride mostly.” Jimmy shrugged. “Smuggling . . .”
A police siren wailed somewhere in the distance, then faded. Kris followed it with her eyes, through the trees.
“Don’t worry. The cops will keep themselves busy setting up roadblocks for the next hour if your friend back there sold the kidnapping story.”
“It won’t be long before someone notices the Jeep. It’s a really small town.” Kris bit her lip, wondering if Ben would guess where they’d gone, wondering if he’d ever speak to her again.
“Well, lucky for us, here comes the train.”
Kris stopped pacing. A whistle blew in the distance and an almost imperceptible vibration hummed under her feet.
“Stay out of sight until the engine passes,” Jimmy said and took up a watch in the shadow of the open door.
“How many times have you done this?” Kris asked. The vibration crept up her legs and the whistle blew again but louder. The Jeep sat across the train tracks on the other side of the fence, waiting for her to lose her nerve.
“A couple times. For research.”
“Research?”
“The Torso Killers liked trains. They left bodies in train yards, in old boxcars like this one back in the ’40s. The Nickel Plate Railroad passed right through Kingsbury Run where the first bodies were found. I think one of the killers owned a rail line.” Jimmy almost had to shout over the roar of the engine as it rumbled closer. He pressed her to the side wall. “This looks promising.”
Kris watched the huge black engine chug past the open door. The screech of its brakes split her ears. Smatterings of graffiti lumbered past along with a steady string of boxcars and flatbeds holding containers.
“This is it!” Jimmy slung her bags onto his shoulders. “They’re slowing down to take the turn. We’re gonna run for it.”
He hopped three feet down onto the gravel berm and reached up for her hand. She scanned the endless chain of containers and open cars and then jumped. They took off running next to the train as the cars continued to slow. The thirty-degree bend in the tracks sat a quarter mile ahead. The engine had already disappeared around the turn. An open bin of scrap metal rattled past. Long patches of dried grass grabbed at her legs, threatening to pull her under as they ran after it.
“This one!” Jimmy hollered and reached up and grabbed a metal handle next to a sliding door. He hopped on to a narrow runner board and slid the metal panel open a foot. Once he’d tossed her bags inside, he held out a hand to pull her up. “C’mon! You can make it!”
Kris was losing her wind. She could feel the train slipping away and her legs going soft. The brakes were no longer screaming. The metal wheels turned faster and faster. Jimmy stretched out toward her, hanging dangerously low from the running board.
“Move that ass, Kris!” he barked, reaching for her. “Don’t let ’em catch you. C’mon!”
She stretched out her arm as far as it would reach, and he caught her wrist. Her feet barely stayed under her at all as he hauled her up onto the running board and pushed her inside.
Kris went tumbling onto the floor, crashing into a wood crate. A sharp piece dug into her thigh. “Ouch!”
“Sorry about that.” Jimmy slid the door closed all but an inch and collapsed onto the ground next to her. “Some rush, huh?”
Her heart pounded its way out of her chest as she struggled to catch her breath. She inspected the long scrape down her leg. “This is crazy!”
“Probably.”
“What’s even in here?” The freight car reeked of motor oil and wet paint.
“Who cares. It’s ours. And nobody knows where we are at the moment. That’s all that matters.”
A nervous laugh escaped her lips. “That’s all that matters? Are you nuts? They know where I live. Ben’s not stupid. They’ll probably be waiting for us at the train yard in Cleveland.”
“I doubt it. Seems obvious to you and me, but it’d probably take ’em at least a few hours to find the car and half a day to question everybody at the diner back there. They’ll be lookin’ for a trucker that picked up a couple hitchhikers.”
“They’ll check my house.”
“So what? You won’t be there. They don’t know where I live. They don’t even know my name.”
“I can’t just hide and wait. My father’s dead, and now you think my mom was murdered too and some maniac out there put a mark on my door . . . on me. And I’ve left everything a mess back there. I don’t have anywhere left to go.” Her body began to tremble as her adrenaline crashed.
“We’ll figure it out, okay? We have to find David Hohman and find out what he knows. Your pop was killed for a reason, and you’re not safe until we figure out what it was.”
“And you think we can do that?” She stared out at the sliver of trees and sky rushing past the car.
“You got a better idea? You want to take your chances with ol’ boy wifebeater back there?”
“No . . . I just—I need to talk to Ben.” But Ben had sent Troy to her house. And he had acted so strange when she’d asked about her mother. He’d been so angry.
“You’re gonna call your cop buddy when we get back. You’re gonna explain how that hillbilly back there hit you, scared the shit out of you, and how you ditched the car, thinking he’d follow you. You’re gonna file a restraining order, right?”
It all sounded right, but the last thing she wanted to do was talk with Ben. She turned to Jimmy and studied his face. The gun. The train
. The way he thought to wipe away fingerprints. “What am I going to say about you?”
“Not a damn thing. There is no me.”
“He won’t buy it. He’s always trusted Troy. They’ll be looking for blood.” Both of them.
Jimmy chuckled. “And that is exactly why we’re sitting on a train right now.”
“I’m going to have to come up with something.”
“Fine. Say we met at school. You hardly know me. You don’t know where I live. I’ll give you a name that they’ll never pin back to me. If it gets too hot, I’ll just take off for a while.”
Kris rubbed her eyes, hoping to unearth some better plan, but came up empty. The boxcar swayed back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm, leaving her limp. She leaned her head against his shoulder and he wrapped an arm around her. She didn’t want Jimmy to just disappear, but an uneasy feeling in her gut nagged at her. What is it? Think.
Closing her eyes, all she could see was Troy’s hand slamming into her head. Her lids flew back open. The fight replayed before her eyes. Troy had said something utterly insane like, He promised we’d be together. She shuddered at how close she’d come to being his prisoner. His victim. There had been plenty of times he’d pressured her into sex, especially when she was younger, but the word rape had never crossed her mind. He promised we’d be together.
Who promised? she wondered. Ben? It was Ben that had called Troy and told him to take her to the morgue. It was Ben that had threatened to drag her back to Cridersville in handcuffs. It was Ben who was so desperate to have the paperwork done and her father’s remains cremated. Ben was a police officer with access to criminal evidence. Her father had never told his own best friend, his only friend, about his research into the Torso Killer. Why not?
“You okay?” Jimmy asked.
“No,” she muttered. “I’m not. I’m going crazy. I feel like I can’t trust anyone anymore.” She’d known Ben her entire life and now her paranoid delusions were turning him into a killer.
“Just breathe. I got you.” He gave her a reassuring squeeze.
Outside the cracked door, the cornfields rushed by in a blur. Kris closed her eyes and tried to process everything that had happened since Ben had shaken her awake. Her mother’s photo flitted in and out of her mind.
Jimmy kept chatting about hobos hopping trains as the metal tracks rumbled beneath them. All Kris could see was her mother’s crumpled car sitting by the side of the road. She never saw the body pulled from the wreckage or laid out on a slab like a burnt mannequin or a gutted deer. At the funeral, they buried a tiny urn and a photograph. For years, Kris would find herself staring at the front door to the house, half expecting the woman to walk through it again one day.
The sway of the train and Jimmy’s voice lulled her to an uneasy sleep. In her dream, she found herself running across a long field. Running toward a woman with open arms.
CHAPTER 44
The train rumbled to a stop on a siding. Jimmy nudged her shoulder, then pulled himself to his feet. Kris glanced at the gap opening between the door and sidewall to see a sliver of Cleveland’s skyline hovering over the murky waters of the Cuyahoga River.
A blast of light hit her in the face as Jimmy slid open the door. He hopped down onto the gravel below. They had landed down in the industrial wasteland flanking the river with mountains of gravel and shipping cranes. A giant cargo ship sat tethered to the far side of the river, a metal city unto itself. It had probably come in through the channels and locks that connected Lake Erie to the ocean. A pair of dockworkers walked by only thirty feet away. One glanced up at her emerging from the boxcar. He shook his head at her and kept walking.
“C’mon!” Jimmy hissed. “Let’s get outta here!”
Kris jumped down and followed him under the abutment of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. They’d landed on the west side of the river, five blocks north of Tremont. The sparse skyline of the city watched from the other side of the water as they picked their way across the stones. The snow had melted away, but the wind still had a bite to it. She shivered in the shadow of the bridge, gazing down into the river. More than one body had been found there.
Four blocks later, they stopped at the foot of Thurman Avenue. Two police cruisers sat parked outside her tiny rental. Ben. She slipped behind the vacant storefront on the corner with its newspapered windows and peeked out at the flashing lights.
“They didn’t waste any time, did they?” Jimmy said from behind her. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down the crossroad. “C’mon.”
A block north on West 7th Street, the gate they’d used the night of Jimmy’s party had been padlocked shut. Kris marveled to think that had only been three days earlier. Her feet slowed in protest as Jimmy led her up to the chained door. She wanted to go back three days. No, a week, or better yet, a year. Back to the last time she’d hugged her father.
“Don’t worry,” Jimmy said, tugging her along. “Just keep an eye out.”
She turned away from the Harmony Press Building and gazed down the block toward Jefferson Avenue and the spot where she liked to park her car. Her rusted-out Jeep was still sitting next to Shirlene’s grease trap 150 miles away. This isn’t my life.
In quick order, Jimmy popped the lock, loosened the chain holding the gate shut, and then squeezed through the gap, pulling her two bags behind him. The slim line of her shotgun pointed at her through the canvas. Her feet followed him while her mind wandered back down Thurman Avenue to the spot where two police cruisers sat, waiting.
Would they arrest her? she wondered. There was no doubt in her mind that they’d arrest Jimmy. The look in Ben’s eyes, sitting across from her at her father’s table, kept her moving. They were the eyes of a stranger.
Jimmy led her through the narrow vaulted passage and into the gallows courtyard. The flashing police lights on Thurman bounced off the dark walls of the loading dock. Kris stared at them through the iron bars of the gate a hundred feet away.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, pulling her through the hobbit door into his wing of the building. “They don’t know we’re here.”
Her eyes traced each door as they went. Dozens of rooms and closets. Dozens of dead ends. She couldn’t keep track of them all as she followed Jimmy up and down crumbling steps and through the dark, narrow hallways. It was the perfect place to hide. Did her father come here to hide too? she wondered.
By the time they’d arrived back in his squatter’s hovel, she felt sick. She collapsed onto Jimmy’s bed with her head in her hands while he unlocked the closet door in the far corner. A computer made from cast-off parts sat in a nest of extension cords and cables. He pulled up a beanbag chair to a cracked computer monitor and began to type. The clacking of the keyboard pounded through the silence as Kris laid back against his pillows. She couldn’t just hide there forever.
“Hey. I think I found somethin’.”
Kris forced herself to sit up.
Jimmy motioned her over to his half-shattered computer screen. “Take a look at this. It’s DHOH’s last postings.”
Kris stood over Jimmy’s shoulder and read the orange text glowing on his monitor. The web address read, www.torsokillers.com. “Wait, I thought the page was down.”
“This is just a screenshot. See the date?” The upper corner gave a date from a week earlier. April 3.
“A screenshot?”
“Yeah. One of the guys in the chat room records everything in case the government or the aliens or whoever he doesn’t trust that day shuts it down. He’s bat-shit crazy, but it comes in handy. Look.”
Kris scanned through the lines of discussion that all seemed to revolve around a series of news clippings posted by DHOH. She scanned the grainy headlines and dates. There was one from February 1997 in Sacramento, California. Body Found in Boxcar. Another from 1995 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unidentified Man Found Dead. There were over twenty similar stories. “They match the ones in my dad’s scrapbook.”
“He wasn’t the only one collecting th
em. See?” Jimmy scrolled down to a discussion thread.
DHOH: All bodies found missing fingers and heads. All found in trains or train yards. Sound familiar?
DOLEZAL: Interesting. Any arrests?
DHOH: All unsolved. 54 dead between 1972 and 1999.
SSLDIDIT: Could be gangland hits. No head, no fingerprints, no ID.
DOLEZAL: Any connection between the bodies?
LOWJACK: What train lines?
Kris stopped reading and pointed at the screen. “I know that guy. That’s the asshole that stole my dad’s police report.”
Jimmy raised both eyebrows and started to say something, but she interrupted by tapping on the computer screen.
“Look at this.”
DHOH: All dead trains passed through Cleveland. All dead trains passed through Lima. All dead trains on the CDX scrap division.
Kris read CDX again and recoiled from the screen. “My dad worked for CDX Rail,” she whispered. “Oh my God. He must’ve seen something.”
“Maybe he did.” Jimmy scrolled down farther. A new name popped up on the screen.
BOGIE: DHOH, any suspects?
DHOH: Working through usual checks. Employee records crossed with criminal records crossed with Torso Database. List getting shorter every day.
“What’s the Torso Database?” Kris asked, pointing to the place on the screen.
“The Notting Hill Killers keep a database of known suspects in the Torso Murders, including Cleveland Nazis and members of the Silver Shirt Legion.”
Kris nodded and went back to reading. Her eyes froze on the next line.
BOGIE: I may have something useful.
DHOH: What do you got?
BOGIE: Probably nothing. DHOH, do you know a good computer repair shop?
DHOH: Hardware trouble?
BOGIE: Getting glitchy. Interference on the dial-up.
DHOH: I’d find a local geek. Repair shops are full of idiots.
BOGIE: Not too much outside Lima. Maybe Shirlene’s knows a guy.
DHOH: Good luck!
“There’s nothin’ after this.” Jimmy tapped the screen. “The name Bogie mean anything to you?”