Skin the Cat

by R Sean McGuirk

  Biddimeyers because their name was painted in life-sized letters on the side of a mammoth RV. Peering through my binoculars, I watched them pull the wheeled-barge into a site not far from the donation box. I rotated the dial with my fingertip and a fat couple pointing to the sky, mouths moving, talking, and moments later a massive green awning folded out.

  A pudgy carrot-topped boy with orange freckles popped out, pedaling a little BMX bicycle. He kept stopping, and yelling at the parents. Overweight. Whiney. Demanding. If I snuck over there tonight and hacked off their heads, I could sleep inside air conditioning, with access to what I’m sure would a week’s worth of hotdogs, potato salad and beer. My thirst and this relentless heat made me actually consider it. And I might have, except for one small glitch: I didn’t murder children. I’d been conditioned into a killer by a strict military code of engagement before I came to America. An elite member in a Special Operations outfit called the Ghatak, or the Hindi translation meaning Lethal Squad, we only killed legitimate targets. And that never included kids.

  The egg-shaped mother shouted at her son, waving a cigarette in the air. Little redheaded Gregory bolted into the RV. I lowered my binoculars and squinted over my shoulder at a patch of forest where only the faintest hint of my ram-shackle Chevy shit-box truck could be seen beneath the leaves. I’d aimed the truck downhill, toward an abandoned gravel fire road in case I needed to leave fast. To the Biddimeyers, I remained a phantom and I meant to keep it that way. On the path back towards my hideout, I checked my watch, adding and subtracting days and dates. Making my own deductions. Why haven’t you dumb-ass cops discovered the next kill? Or have you? Then something odd. Chubby Gregory, a kid mop of red hair flashing, back outside, and…what? I lifted my binoculars again. He was gazing through his own set, two large lenses aimed toward my position. I froze. He scanned, dropped the binoculars, totally uninterested, picking at his foot. He hadn’t seen shit.

  I crept beneath a low hanging curtain of kudzu vines and sat in a bed of wild ferns hidden in shadow. I swung my binoculars to the side, retrieved my palm-sized transistor radio, clicked it on and glued it to my ear. Fighting off exhaustion, and suffering Bluegrass music until the top of the hour, I perked up when the local headlines broke through. In the static I heard it. The voice cracking with weak reception, talking of murder, me putting the speaker against my ear. “The apparent death of philanthropist Cynthia Greymore has left the community of Story Mount stunned and saddened. Authorities need your help in locating the suspect at large, Dr. Svidi Malhotra, a well-known local cosmetic surgeon who…”

  I turned the radio off. Hey Charlie, missing the wife? Surely my face was splashed everywhere now, social media, television, the papers, you name it. Prime suspect. Killer at large. But I had no panic. My heart rate didn’t lift at all. I took a deep breath and exhaled. Shoulders limp. I felt fucking good. Strangely, all the stress and anxiety rippled away as I drew a deep breath. I realized at that moment that the catalyst for all my fear wasn’t getting caught. My fear was whether the investigation revealed me as the killer or not. The not knowing stressed me out. But now I knew. Meet Svidi Malhotra, public enemy number one, homicidal maniac. Swept over with an unexpected wave relief, I sunk into a deep slumber inside the shadows.

  A sonic boom, and I sat up, disoriented, soaking in sweat. Another explosion followed by a deep rumble that shook the trees. Vaguely dazed, I rose to my feet, and peered through a curtain of green vines to see lavender thunderheads mushrooming in the west as they spilled into the valley, the sun fading then quickly blotted out, the day taking on the idea of night. The air smelled like wet static and lightning sparkled in the darkening horizon. I yanked the binoculars up to my eyes and dialed into the Biddimeyer’s RV, wondering if they were clearing out because this storm looked that bad. The image came into the lens, crisp and sharp. My mouth fell open. Little Gregory held his tiny orange BMX bike up between his thighs, feet flat on the ground, pointing his finger straight at me. I panned to the left and the right, heart jumping in my chest. The ground seemed to churn, black shadows becoming uniforms, the white letters spelling SWAT stamped on the shirts of heavily armed men. More came into view. Soldier-cops in black flak jackets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders fanned into the trees, slithered over rocks, ever rolling and rolling in toward me with magnetic fervor. That little fat red-headed fucker.

  “Dr. Svidi Malhotra,” a metallic voice burst out from a speaker like a sharpened pair of scissors and echoed across the valley. “We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up. Let’s end this.”

  A searing streak of lightning cracked and the belly of the sky ripped open. Torrential sheets of driving rain violently whipped trees side to side, the forest suddenly coming alive, the blue electrical strobes catching blinks of the wild swinging and swaying. Thank God. I broke into a dead-ass sprint straight to my truck, thunder and lightning exploding overhead like bombs. Clothes soaked through and hair dripping in my face, I ripped the pine branches from windshield and left the rest intact for cover. I hopped in the driver seat, placed my 9mm in the passenger seat beside me and shifted the gear into neutral without turning on the ignition. The old truck ambled downhill, breaking through low shrubs and brush, squeaking on its frame as it crossed over the shoulder of the fire road, gaining momentum on the slope until a half-mile down I twisted the key to the ignition, and the engine sputtered then sprang to life. Gassing it hard, rainwater spilled down the doorframe, the wiper blades slapped liquid all around, the headlights beaming into what looked like a waterfall. I had escaped like a fish gliding downstream. My thoughts pulsed and stirred, the chaos of the storm outside now moving inside, the anger swirling in my chest, my git going alive with bad ideas.

  Charles Greymore…

  Where might you be?

  32

  Planting Lilacs

  An early AA meeting attended, and the balance of the day always came along a little softer and easier. How the act of sitting in a small circle of folding chairs, telling on my darkest desires for drink, and performing steps of confession and amends insulated me from drinking, I hadn’t a clue. I didn’t understand why it worked. But it did. So I kept returning for more. And that, they said, was the key. More. More right choices. More sobriety. I knew the score and I understood consequences. I’d heard enough stories of people with years of sobriety go down in flames, and crash. I had no interest in purchasing that ticket. Again. Inside the door, an old woman with a hump back stood over her walker and looked up at me, the oxygen tubing in her nose wiggling as she struggled to breathe.

  “You,” she smiled.

  “Good morning Alistaire,” I gave her a light squeeze.

  “Now sit your ass down and get some sobriety,” she winked.

  I’d seen Melanie a dozen times inside the room since our spontaneous chat at Mojo’s, where I stupidly filled in that gap in the gossip chain and admitted to being a widower. After seeing me at the Harmony murder scene in the truck, and realizing her grandfather was my boss, she became weirdly somewhat protective of me. She always saved a seat at meetings and poured us two cups of coffee when I arrived. Our friendship swayed to the personal, that our chats found her resting her hand on my wrist, giving me full attention, her amber eyes with gold at the edges searching each eye, one at a time. While I didn’t question Melanie’s authenticity to become a true friend to me, but as a detective, I couldn’t help but to weight the possibility of hidden motives. I worried that her fondness for me might be driven by pity, like some codependent oh-I-must-save-the-hurt-bird syndrome. The whole reason I moved to Story Mount was to shake off the perception of a damaged guy whose bombed out life still smoldered. How naïve to think my history would stay neatly folded away like starched shirts tucked in a closed drawer. As if a geographical change could erase the past. I knew better. I couldn’t hide shit. In certain moments I even felt infected with my own brand of leprosy.

  Crossing the
room and finding a seat, Melanie spotted me, smiled and pointed at the coffee maker. I nodded. Perhaps my skepticism toward her friendship was just a way to throw up my wall. I’d gotten good at it. I’d been taught how. I could walk out the fucking door and no one would ever see me again. A coward Houdini masterfully slipping out of every real human bond for fear of being hurt. I just wanted to be like these people. Just to be able to breathe in easily, accept life on life’s terms and have a little gratitude. But my insider struggled against everyone else’s outsider. My spine always sizzled with some low current of anxiety and doubt.

  “Good morning stranger,” Melanie smiled. Ripped from the trance, I jumped in my skin and wondered if she saw. I came to my feet, hugged her, and noticed the shape of her ribcage, how it fit perfectly in my arms, and quickly let go. The entire meeting passed but I missed the whole thing, my mind dominated by the murders. I struggled to theorize who might be next or whether Story Mount’s potential victims might leave town for a while if our department asked them to. After the Lord’s Prayer, Melanie walked with me to my car in the rear parking lot.

  “You seem distracted Shade,” she said tilting her head and blinking at me.

  I nodded and pinched the bridge of my nose, and came back with a soft smile. “The murders.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Care to talk?”

  I leaned left, my hip popped and I drove my thumb into the socket with the hope it didn’t make a sound. “The whole thing is spinning out of control. I mean how weird that…” my voice trailed off.

  “Yeah?” she tilted her head, furrowing her sharp eyebrows.

  “These homicides, I don’t know what your grandfather has told you, but they have occurred between entirely different groups of people. The demographics are off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I hesitated wondering why I found Melanie so dangerously easy to talk to. “Only between us?” I said pulling out a piece of nicotine gum and chewing it.

  “Promise.”

  “From a distance,” I sighed and stared at my feet. “This whole thing looks like, what.” Stating the question to myself. “Like class warfare,” I sighed. “First a throng of poverty-stricken hillbillies are mowed down, blown up and now wealthy women are being surgically dissected. Like one is answering the other. And Debbie and I are short a motive. We’re missing the key to the entire case. And it is all the same case.”

  “There’s only one thing that matters, Shade,” Melanie said, folding her hands and waiting until she caught my eye.

  “What’s that?”

  “The answers will come,” she said eyes smiling. “But in the meantime, just do this one thing: Don’t drink. Everything else will be revealed.”

  I chewed the nicotine gum and pulled out my keys. “I won’t,” I grinned. That part was easy enough. On the other hand, I didn’t feel like everything or even anything in this case would be revealed. Not now. Not ever. Looking to jump into the day before more dead people turned up, I gave her a hug goodbye.

  “Mojo’s again soon?” she asked, her skin radiating like dipped honey in the early morning sunlight.

  “Sure,’ I nodded not feeling so sure. “That sounds great.”

  I watched her cross the parking lot, where at the last moment she looked back, lifted her hand with a smile just before disappearing around the corner. My phone buzzed. Debbie. I answered as I fumbled the door handle of the Taurus. “What you got?”

  “Reporting nothing,” Debbie said, clicking a pen against her teeth. “And that’s the big fucking problem.”

  “On my way in,” I grunted.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re in a holding pattern until after lunch. The Chief said to sit on our hands until he got back from his meeting in Frankfort with Mayor Marty Breznik.” She paused. “He’s gone and I need a break from this shit.”

  “Where’re you headed?”

  “To groom Sadie and Bucks,” her voice lifted.

  “Ah, your horses?”

  “Horse therapy,” she mused. “Meet here at two?”

  “Done.”

  The break worked out perfectly. Until Stan Gadford finished some forensics work, I would take this brief island of time and do that secret thing for myself. The one thing no one knew about. The one thing no one would ever know about. So I hopped in the Taurus and zipped straight back to my rental cottage on the top of Iron mountain. The view always made me pause before I went inside. Like looking out of an airplane window. The valley wide, open and bowl-shaped, the edge rising up and up to blue crumpled peaks of the Cumberland Mountains. On the clearest days, faint glimpses of downtown Story Mount could be seen twinkling far below, where some unknown building or object caught the sunlight. Over a period of a week, I finally deduced it was the bell on the courthouse. But honestly, I couldn’t say for sure. I stepped inside. The kids were spending the morning with their cousins at Vanessa and Luke’s place. I had the place all to myself. Whatever had been wrong with my sister-in-law Vanessa, her acute symptoms of control and recrimination, the personal attacks she launched while we lived with her, all those vanished the day we moved out. It was like a wand had been waved over her head, and she’d returned to her compassionate and loving self. It was then I realized it wasn’t the me living with her part that bothered her. It was me the person. Just like that twinkling light reaching up here from Story Mount. I just couldn’t figure it out. And I getting to tired or to old to try. I thought my car keys on a side table, walked down the hallway and pushed open my bedroom door. Emily, forgive me. It’s been too long.

  I pulled the shades and stood there in the dark thinking of her. Reflecting. She always teased me. We’d make love for hours. Then we’d engage in silly dialogue, laughing like teenagers. She brought out my inner child. A playful, perhaps even naive boy. She’d drop her head, palms on her face, hair falling forward, laughing. I found it intoxicating. I gave her all of me. Every last bit. In heaven I’d hoped she’d let me plant her a garden as she lounged, sipping sweet tea, a pair of love birds laughing and teasing, making love. As an investigator, I knew only one truth in this world. One rule that stood the test of all time: True love. We were each assigned one soulmate. Only one. And for that one person, the devotion needed to be whole, complete, a real labor of love until our final dying breath. Sure, I could be accused of being a romantic. But the pain of losing a soulmate was permanent. I knew it intimately. I’m not sure she ever understood how deeply I loved her. I’m not sure she was capable of it. It was a thought I couldn’t bear. My own personal hell.

  Lights off, I sank to the oriental rug on the floor inside, legs crossed, my spine straight, Lotus position. I reached under the bed, pulled out the candle and the lighter. A flick of the thumb and room became animated with shadows dancing against the flame, the walls seeming to pulse and breathe. I reached again, groping for the wooden case, unfastened the latch, my stomach jumping as it always did. I lifted the urn out, and placed it between my thighs. Everyone at the funeral had formed an unspoken consensus that the coffin remained closed because Emily had been too disfigured in the accident for public viewing. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Emily wasn’t inside it. The coffin was empty. And buried that way. I’d made sure of it. I twisted off the lid, my eyes going hot and watery, the stutter of uneven breathing taking hold. I could stay here for two hours today. With nervous anticipation, I reached inside and touched her cremated ashes with my fingertips. And I wept.

  33

  Skin the Cat

  On Monday, I beelined over to Cynthia Greymore’s funeral, uninvited but indistinguishable from anyone else. Dark suits, dark dresses, dark sunglasses, people everywhere, maybe all of Story Mount. Nobody could fucking tell it was me. Yes, I’ll admit it, the voyeur within wanted to see Charles Greymore choked up, tears flowing and writhing in pain near the head of the casket that he
ld his chopped up wife. But that wasn’t why I was here. According to comprehensive psychiatric studies gathered from thousands of interviews with imprisoned serial killers and homicidal freaks, the absolute pattern had been proven over and over again: Psychopaths were addicted to every aspect of it, the set up, the kill, the effect. The way the arsonist shows up to watch fire fighters drag charred bodies from the flames while still holding the match. The reason the strangler meanders up to the yellow crime tape surrounded by cops, only feet from his victim sprawled on the sidewalk, holding her earrings in his hand. According to the psychological studies, it was the reason I was here today. To see the result of my work. Like a trophy for my accomplishments. And the sense of power that came with it? I have to admit there was nothing else like it. Taking another human life was the most powerful drug in the world.

  But honestly, that’s not why I showed up. The pomp and circumstance? All the limousines, the cameras and news crews? None of this shit mattered to me. I operated with a set of principles. I stepped out of the shadows and stabbed you in the neck because you made it my job. You deserved it. Community rank and fame and costumes and wealth and status and being at the right place at the right time for social media posts, marketing your own brand and other mutations, all this just to show the world you were important? All because you were incapable of loving yourself? None of this mattered while you watched your blood flow out and down, the purple puddle stretching around your feet. Blood is the great equalizer. No, I wasn’t here for the party. I was here for business.

  I studied the grassy hillside of the Exodus County Cemetery, the horizon stitched and stabbed with white tombstones, sharp teeth biting into earth. The finality of it. A slow procession of darkly dressed mourners approached a mausoleum, the limestone walls grown over with hanging strands of English ivy. “Greymore” was spelled in black granite letters over the doorway of the vault. The growing crowd pushed in on Cynthia Greymore’s tomb like she might be a rock star. Not paying attention, I ran right straight into the guy. A fat man wearing a headset and a striped shirt. He got in my face. “Hey, you there, watch where the hell you’re walking.”