by Blake Banner
“You can’t have one. I can.” When he had delivered it and gone away, she said, “I thought that too. The arms could be Lynda’s. She didn’t have a record, so when they ran the prints and the DNA, they wouldn’t have got a hit.”
“Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’ll find out where Hank is living these days while you check for dismembered female bodies in late 2005, early 2006. Talk to Bernie at the bureau. Also, on the off chance, talk to the sheriffs and PDs in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.”
“What about girls who went missing at that time?”
“We will probably have to go down that route eventually, but without fingerprints or DNA, and nothing to compare dental records with…”
We talked a little longer, and when she’d finished her beer, I looked at my watch. She raised her hand like she was hailing a cab and said, “This one’s on me, Sensei.”
I smiled. “I know better than to argue. Next one’s on me.”
“You bet.”
Outside, the road was deserted. The puddles looked black and oily, and rippled with small gusts of cold wind and drizzle. The light from the streetlamps and the shop fronts lay orange and listless across the water, like it had lost all hope of ever being bright and merry. We climbed in the Jag and slammed the doors. I fired her up, and Dehan gave an almighty yawn.
“Let’s go home, pardner.”
FOUR
It was another dull, drizzling morning with occasional rolls of thunder, like some giant moving big furniture across the clouds. Dehan spent the morning digging up what she could about the IT company, the chemist, and the bar, and I tracked down Hank. He had spent some time in California and Arizona, but now he was back in New York with his own workshop, Hank’s Bikes, fixing and customizing hogs in Brooklyn, on Surf Avenue, right by the Brooklyn Cyclones.
We grabbed a couple of sandwiches and ate them in the car as we drove down through Queens, just ahead of the lunch-hour traffic. Brighton Beach in November is not the most depressing place on Earth, but that’s about the best that can be said for it. It’s gaudy and brassy and desolate, and seems to be populated by people who have swapped hope for various forms of psychosis.
Hank’s Bikes was a big prefab situated on a huge parking lot just off Surf Avenue. I parked outside, and a tall, blond, bearded guy in his mid-thirties came out wiping his hands on a cloth. He wasn’t looking at me or Dehan; his eyes were fixed on the Jag.
“Sweet ride, mister. Real thing, huh. Right-hand drive—what is she, ’65?”
“1964, 210 brake horsepower.”
“You got the original plates?”
“Framed at home.”
“You lookin’ to sell her?”
I laughed. “No way, not no how.”
He smiled. “Shame. She’s worth a bit, especially with the original plates. Spoke wheels. Man. She is sweet.”
Out over the Atlantic, thunder boomed and then rolled. I said, “Are you Hank Junkers?”
He nodded. “You’re askin’ like that, you gotta be cops.”
I showed him my badge, as did Carmen.
“Detectives Stone and Dehan. We’re just following up an old case, and we’d like to ask you some questions.”
He jerked his head toward the workshop and led the way in. As he walked he said, “I ain’t seen Zak for over ten years. And I ain’t been in trouble since I came back from Tucson. That’s gotta be five or six years ago.”
The light inside was dull, but he had a couple of arc lamps set up where he was working on a Harley. I had a look. It was good, precision work. He was fastidious and detailed. A perfectionist.
“What’s this about?”
“You used to have a lockup in the Bronx, at the back of Revere Avenue.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“What can you tell me about the people who had the next unit?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “That was ten, twelve years ago! I don’t remember.” He thought a moment. “What side?”
“On the right of yours.”
He stared out at the wet, gray lot. It had started to rain again, and cold air was fingering its way in. “Yeah. That was Pete.” He laughed. “He was a young guy, ’bout my age, but man, was he stuck-up. He didn’t approve of me. Used to lecture me on how I would never make anything of my life if I didn’t plan for the future. He had a cute wife. Jane…?”
Dehan smiled. It was a troubling, conspiratorial smile. “You and Jenny ever get it together?”
He snapped his finger and leaned his ass on his workbench. “Jenny! Nah, I tried once, but she didn’t want to know. I’m talking like we were old buddies, but he was always away and she was always in the house. I only saw them a few times in a couple of years.” He screwed up his face. “Why you askin’ me about Pete?”
I ignored his question. “What about Lynda?”
His face went hard. “What about Lynda?”
“You ever see her these days?”
He shook his head. “You wanna know about Lynda, you better ask Zak. I ain’t spoken to Lynda in twelve years. Since I was in the Bronx…” He paused, putting two and two together. “What’s this about? Do I need a lawyer?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
Dehan said, “Who’s Zak?”
“Zak was the son of a bitch who took Lynda from me. We was in the same chapter.”
“Of the Angels?” she asked.
He nodded. “We were like brothers. More than brothers. And he knew that I was crazy about Lynda. But…” He paused, thinking. “2005 Christmas rally, we all gathered at Camp Kaufmann, outside Holmes, near Poughkeepsie. Man, he would not stop comin’ on to her. Givin’ me all this shit about how we were bros, and bros should share everything…”
Dehan asked him, “How did she take it? Did it make her mad?”
He made a face that looked genuinely sad. “Nah, she was laughing, going along with it. Telling me not to be so uptight.”
“What happened?” I said.
“We got into a fight. I told her to choose. It was either me or him. She chose him.”
Dehan said, “Fight? What kind of fight?”
He sighed. “Look, back in the bad old days, I hit a few women. I regret that more than I can say and more than you’d probably believe anyway. But I done my time for it, and I am reformed. But right then she was with Zak and two hundred other brothers, so if I’d tried to lay a hand on her they would have gut me and thrown me in the pond. I was mad enough to give her a hiding, the way she treated me that night. But I didn’t.” Suddenly he looked mad. “You gonna tell me what the fuck this is about or not? I ain’t answering no more questions till you do.”
I sighed. “What date was that rally, Hank?”
“I just told you I ain’t answering no more of your questions till you tell me what this is about.”
“Twelve years ago, two arms were found in Peter Smith’s lockup. We are trying to find out who they belong to, and who put them there.”
He gaped at me. Then he gaped at Dehan for a bit and then gaped at me again. “Two arms? Like arms and legs? Two arms? And, what? You think I put them there? You think they’re Lynda’s arms and I put them there? Why the fuck would I do something as dumb as that?”
“I don’t know, and I am not saying you did.” I asked again, “What date was that rally, Hank?”
He blew out, making an exaggerated noise, and spread his hands. “How the fuck should I know? It was the first weekend of December, Friday through Monday.”
Dehan checked her phone. “Second to the fifth. What day was your fight with Zak and Lynda?”
“The last day. Man, I can’t believe you are trying to pin this on me. I fuckin’ walked away. You can ask Zak. Ask any of the fuckin’ bros. I walked away.”
“Where can I find Zak?”
He was silent for a while. “He’s got a club up in Maine, ’bout thirty miles west of Portland, on Sebago Lake. It’s called the Hellfire Club.” He looked at us fixedly, first Dehan and then me. “If you
tell him I said where to find him, he will kill me. You’ll have my blood on your hands.”
“Don’t worry, Hank. We’re not out to get anybody hurt.” I pointed at the bike. “It’s nice work. Keep it up.”
He didn’t answer. He just watched us hunch through the rain to the Jag and climb in. As I fired up the engine, I glanced across Dehan. Hank was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking like a Viking in blue overalls.
The wipers set up their squeak/thud rhythm, and we eased our way out onto Surf Avenue again. Dehan looked around at the long, straight rows of dreariness and shook her head. “When I die, if I’ve been really, really bad, I’ll be sent somewhere like this.” I laughed and she glanced at me. “At least in hellfire, you can scream and shout because you’re in pain. You’re feeling something, right? But this! To eternally feel nothing but boredom…”
I grunted. “To feel nothing is more painful than to feel pain. You’re deep, Dehan.”
“So what did you think of him?”
“I thought he was a nice guy. I liked him.”
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “You’re something, Stone. One of a kind.”
“What? You didn’t like him?”
“Like him? I’d like to whip his ass all the way back to Poughkeepsie.”
“You think the arms are the arms of his lover?”
“It’s at least possible.”
“Let’s see what Zak says tomorrow.”
FIVE
Dehan made contact with somebody at the Global Computer Shipping Company, so she went to talk to them and I drove out to Maine to see if I could find Zak and the Hellfire Club.
I took the I-95 all the way to Portland, following the coast, then Brighton Road and the Roosevelt Trail out to Raymond, on the lake. It took me a little over five hours, and it rained all the way. For my money, New England is probably the most beautiful place on Earth. In spring and fall, there is no probably about it. But in winter, there’s something sinister about the heavy, lowering clouds and the trees, like cold, naked hands reaching up with crooked fingers into an unforgiving sky.
It was two in the afternoon as I left Portland behind me and started west through dense woodlands of tall, dark pines that seemed to go on forever. At twenty past, I was skirting the lake outside Raymond, looking for Cape Road. The water was flat and gray, like a mirror reflecting the heavy clouds overhead. I finally found it just outside South Casco and turned left, winding through five or six miles of thick forest. After about fifteen minutes, I finally came to a fork in the road. The left fork was narrow and overgrown, and plunged down, like a track through dense jungle. A wooden sign with an arrow on it read This Way to the Hellfire Club.
The track led to a driveway, which in turn snaked through pines and came out at a broad grass clearing with an old, gabled house in the middle. It was big, three stories with a basement. At a glance, I figured there must be seven to ten bedrooms, if they had converted the loft.
I followed the drive to the front of the house. There were half a dozen choppers, an old Land Rover, and an early model ’90s Jeep sitting there. I parked where it would be awkward for them to leave, just in case, climbed out, and slammed the door. As I headed toward the porch, a man stepped out the front door and stood looking down at me. He was tall, six two or three, lean, and rangy, but you could tell he was hard and tough too. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a black T-shirt, and he had a forked beard that reached down to his belt buckle, which was shaped like a skull. He was anything but original, but he was the real thing.
I said, “Are you Zak?”
“You come into my domain, you don’t get to ask me who I am. I ask you who you might be.”
I pulled out my badge and showed it to him. “Detective Stone of the NYPD.”
“You’re off your turf, NYPD. Why don’t you get back in your pretty, foreign car and get the fuck off my land?”
I sighed. Originality was clearly something I was not going to find at the Hellfire Club. “Because if I do, then I’ll have to come back with a warrant, the FBI, and guns. And all I want to do is to ask you a few questions about an investigation that probably has nothing to do with you in the first place. I’m getting wet out here. Why don’t you invite me in, give me a cup of java, and I’ll be gone in fifteen minutes?”
He smiled a smile that he probably intended to be cruel, but I was too wet to care. He said, “Sure, why not?” turned, and walked back into the house. I climbed the stairs after him. Over the door there was a carving of two elaborate devils holding a scroll on which was written Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Nice.
He was standing in the shadows inside the house. As I stepped over the threshold, he pulled a cigarette from a pack and lit it with an old brass Zippo. The walls were covered with erotic murals. Some were psychedelic, evocative of the ’60s. Others were impressionistic. Some were even good.
There was a huge face of Crowley done in red and black, like the famous picture of Che. Written underneath it in flowing, gold script was Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Zak dropped into an old leather sofa and pointed to a chair. I sat, wiping water from my face and my hair. Zak gave a shrill whistle, and a girl of maybe twenty, with hollow eyes and a stud in her lip, came in in bare feet. She looked sad. Zak pointed at me and said, “Bring the cop a towel.” She hurried away at a little run. He smiled at me. “She’s an acolyte.”
She came running back a couple of minutes later with a big, fluffy towel and handed it to me with a small bow. I took the towel and said, “Don’t ever bow to me. Have some self-respect. Don’t ever bow to anybody, unless they’re bowing back.”
Zak said, “Go.” She left. “What do you want to ask me, Detective Stone?”
“I want to know about your big Christmas get-together in 2005, in Connecticut, near Holmes. You remember that?”
His face was empty. He just smoked and stared at me. Eventually he said, “What’s to remember? That was twelve years ago. We spent four days stoned, high and drunk.”
“I’m trying to trace two people whom I believe were at that rally. I think you had close ties to them.”
“All bros have close ties, man.”
“One was your best friend. The other was your girlfriend.”
He laughed. “Girlfriend? What, were we dating? Or just fucking and getting stoned together?”
I listened to the rain for a bit while he finished wheezing his laugh. When he was done, he said, “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I fucked a lot of chicks. I can’t remember all the ones I fucked in 2005.”
“Her name was Lynda.”
He shrugged.
“How about your best friend? Or don’t you have them either? Do you just fuck them too?”
It was a curious thing to watch. His expression stayed the same, but the smile drained out of it, turning it into an ugly, dangerous mask. His voice was quiet.
“I don’t fuck guys, Detective Stone. Sometimes I fuck them up, bad, but I don’t just plain fuck them. What was this guy’s name?”
“Hank. You remember Hank?”
“Yeah. I remember Hank.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“No. I ain’t seen Hank since that rally in 2005.”
“How about Lynda?”
Any trace of a smile had left his face. “I already told you, I don’t remember any Lynda.”
“You remember Hank, but you don’t remember Lynda. I find that kind of hard to believe.”
“I think you had better leave now, Detective Stone. It’s going to be getting dark soon, and these roads can be real dangerous at night.”
I sat forward. Somewhere in the house, the wind made a door creak. A squall of rain lashed the window. “You see, Zak, I know that you remember Lynda. So I have to ask myself, what is it that’s making you pretend that you don’t? What makes you want to hide your relationship to Lynda from the cops so bad that you wou
ld actually threaten that cop’s life? And it is that kind of question that is going to have me and a dozen Feds swarming all over your house like flies on shit. I wonder what we’re going to find? Besides the coke and the meth, do you think we’ll find any body parts?”
He held up both hands and shouted, “Woah! Take it easy, Mr. NYPD. There ain’t nobody threatening nobody here. And there ain’t no fucking bodies buried in my garden. Take it easy. Chill.”
“Chill? Next time you threaten me with violence, Zak, you better be prepared to make good on your threat, because I am going to whip your sorry ass all the way back to New York, where I will throw you into Rikers and watch you rot there for the rest of your miserable life. And believe me, there will be no law of Thelema there.”
“Okay—it was just talk. Take it easy.”
“Tell me about Hank and Lynda.”
He flopped back his head and closed his eyes like I was boring him. “Hank was a bro. He had a chick, and she was cute, hot, you know?” He looked at me, like he was actually asking me if I knew what a hot chick was. “But Hank was soft. He cared. You can’t care in life. It doesn’t work that way. He was always talking about bros, and loyalty, and being there for each other…” He laughed again. “Man… and he was all dewy-eyed and going to pieces over this bitch. So I tried to help him.”
“Help him? How?”
“I told him, let’s fuck the bitch together. Lose your respect for her, man. Treat her like the piece of trash she is. You let a woman get inside you and you are fucked. I mean, you do not fuck them, they fuck you and they fuck you bad. I have seen many a bro go down because he went soft over a chick.”
“So did he agree?”
“No, man. He got mad. Which proves what I am telling you. Women are evil. They are like poison. They are there to serve us and bring us to manhood, nothing more. You start treating them with respect, they fucking eat you alive. Like the man said, if you’re going to women, don’t forget the whip.”
“Spare me your philosophy, Zak. What happened?”
“Nothing. I tried to make him see sense. She was fucking all over me. He gave her a choice, him or me. She made the wrong fucking choice. She chose me. That’s women, man. Fucking stupid. He left. I never heard from him again. Somebody told me he went out west.”