4 Brewed, Crude and Tattooed

by Sandra Balzo

  If she was trapped in the meat locker, the coat on Aurora’s body - assuming Verdeaux had been able to pry it off her - might keep Ms Gross-National alive, though I had no idea for how long. Other than that, I couldn’t imagine why any normal woman, cold or not, would want clothing in which another woman had been murdered.

  As I pulled on the locker handle, my stir-stick barely illuminated some of the work area behind the meat case. A number of deli and butcher tools had been laid out, presumably to be packed or sold. Next to them were canned goods, stacked in neat rows.

  Swinging open the freezer’s door and bracing it with my heel, I stood outside the threshold, waiting for a blast of air measurably colder than that in the store or the service corridor to pass.

  Then, holding the light ahead of me, I peered into the freezer. Or tried to. The swizzle stick flashlight worked about as well as it did inside the service hallway. Which was, not much.

  ‘Dammit,’ I said out loud. ‘I feel like I’m in an episode of the X-Files.’

  I moved my meager light source around. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the near pitch-dark. Close to me I could make out bags of what looked like frozen vegetables, tubs of something, and...Yup, I could confirm Way was still on the shelf and Aurora, still in the cart.

  But, what was that over by the corner?

  Shit, shit, shit. It could be nothing, or it could be Naomi Verdeaux crumpled into a heap. I had no way of knowing, unless I moved into the locker. And I’d seen too many movies where the stupid heroine enters a room - or a meat freezer or a tanning bed - and ends up trapped. And dead.

  ‘Stupidcide’ I think they call it.

  I considered the situation. If I went over the threshold, I could become the heap in the other corner. And I certainly never had an empathetic moment in the presence of Naomi Verdeaux.

  Still...she was another human being.

  I looked around for something I could put in the jamb to keep the heavy door from closing behind me. Let’s see: scale, meat slicer, cleaver...

  I settled on a can of kidney beans.

  Using the container as a doorstop, I stepped into the freezer. Cautiously approaching the corner, I shined my light on the dark pile.

  I had been holding my breath, I realized, and now I let it out. Then I wasn’t sure if I should have.

  The heap was not Naomi Verdeaux.

  It was, however, her coat.

  The question, of course, was why would Verdeaux have come in here and wrestled the coat off a frozen body, only to leave the fur on the floor. Had she been interrupted?

  Even as I had the thought, I heard a noise behind me.

  Grabbing the coat, I ran to the door.

  Sure enough, it was closed tight. Either my kidney beans had let me down or someone had intervened, shutting me inside the freezer with two corpses, frozen peas and a couple of tubs of margarita mix.

  At least I wouldn’t die of starvation. Cold, yes, (subtract another five degrees for my anxiety level), but not starvation. Or even scurvy.

  And why in the hell hadn’t we had margaritas instead of those lousy old-fashioneds?

  I realized I was still holding Verdeaux’s coat, petting it like a dog with my rapidly numbing fingers. Next thing I’d be talking to it, like Tom Hanks did in that movie where he was marooned on a tropical island. Except this wasn’t a volley ball.

  OK, OK, Maggy. Settle down. No need to get hysterical here. Think.

  I concentrated on the coat, slowing my breathing. Someone would come looking for me. Eventually.

  I petted the coat again. At least, I think I did. My fingers were no longer transmitting micro-climate news to my brain.

  I might never see Eric again. Or Frank. Or Pavlik. Or Pavlik’s jacket.

  A little sob escaped me.

  As I took my hand from the coat, I touched something crusty. Aurora’s blood, of course. I couldn’t tell if the crustiness was because it had dried or frozen or both.

  But I felt something else, too, and now I moved the stir stick closer to examine it.

  A bullet hole.

  I didn’t have experience with guns, not the way I did with less noisy methods of dealing death. On the other hand, I probably watched as much television as anyone else.

  The hole had been hidden in the fur of the hood, but now that the caked blood had matted everything down, it was obvious.

  So, Aurora had been shot.

  And I was still stuck in a freezer.

  I pounded on the door, my closed fist without any feeling in it at all. ‘Is anybody out there?’

  Preferably someone without a gun?

  I heard a crash through the door. Whether it was thunder or a gunshot, I couldn’t tell.

  Dropping the coat, I redoubled my efforts. Meaning I pounded on the door with two numbed fists. That’s when I brushed against something round and flat on the door. A door knob?

  I tried to turn the thing and pull. It turned all right, but that didn’t seem to produce any results. So, I tried to slide it up, then slide it down. Still nothing.

  So I used my marginally less-frozen fist to just pound the knob itself.

  Thanks be to God if the door didn’t swing open.

  I rubbed my less frozen one, with my more frozen one. I didn’t know which hurt more. The one I’d just smacked the door with would be bruised tomorrow to match my shoulder and my shin, but I was free.

  I should have known there would be an emergency release. This was the twenty-first century, where we’re protected from everything but our own ignorance.

  I stepped out of the freezer and into the market proper. Truth be told, the store was nearly as cold as the freezer. Maybe we would have been better off leaving Way and Aurora outside the freezer, even outside the mall, as we’d found them.

  I heard another crack. A more distinct version of what came through the freezer door.

  I looked up.

  The ceiling tiles above me were gone and through the framework I could see the flat roof of the shopping mall. As I watched, there was another crack, louder and longer than the others. As I turned to run, there was a really loud crash and the butt end of a joist hit the ground between me and the hallway door.

  As debris and snow rained down, I made for the front door instead. It was locked, but you can’t say I hadn’t learned from my mistakes. I turned the deadbolt and pushed the door as hard as I could.

  With a strength borne of desperation and downright terror, I managed to push the door hard enough to clear the snow now piled in front of it. I squeezed through the small opening and waded into the thigh-deep snow on the sidewalk, trying to get away from the building. When I hit the curb buried in the snow, I fell forward into the parking lot.

  As I landed face-down in the snow, I heard a familiar sound.

  ‘Pfft.’

  Because the temperature was hovering just below freezing, the bottom couple inches of what had been snow was now slush. I raised my face out of the muck and looked around.

  The snowfall was finally letting up and the clouds had thinned a bit. The slightest of glows in the east signaled that dawn was approaching, if not imminent. It was enough, though, to backlight the landscape.

  A winter wonderland of sorts. Snow clung to everything. Telephone wires, street signs, tree branches that already had begun to bud. Under one of the maples at the corner of the building, Rudy and Naomi Verdeaux were in a clinch. Verdeaux didn’t have a coat on, but I didn’t think Rudy was trying to keep her warm.

  I pushed myself up, the slush falling off Aurora’s coat in sloshing globs. As I stood, Rudy, whose back was toward me, turned.

  ‘It’s over, Rudy,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just let her go?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I love her.’

  Apparently ‘her’ didn’t feel the same way. Wrapped in Rudy’s arms, Verdeaux said nothing.

  ‘I understand.’ I moved closer. ‘Naomi made you feel young. You had her, even if you weren’t town chairman anymore. It made you feel im
portant, having a beautiful woman on your arm. Then you realized she didn’t care about any relationship with you.’

  Rudy just looked at me. I was near enough now to see tears in his eyes.

  ‘I felt the same way when Ted left me,’ I continued, ‘and I left my job. Eric was off at school to boot, and I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. If I’m not Maggy Thorsen of First National, or Ted’s wife, or Eric’s mother, who was I?’

  ‘You are still Eric’s mother,’ Rudy muttered. ‘I have no one.’

  ‘You’re right.’ I was continuing to move - slowly - toward them. ‘Even if Eric is away, I am still his mother. But you’re still someone, too.’

  Rudy laughed.

  I wasn’t quite seeing the humor in it. I pointed at the lightening sky. ‘It’s nearly morning and the snow has let up. We can get out of here soon.’

  He laughed a little harder.

  I paused a beat. Two. ‘You can get out of here. Just let Naomi go, Rudy.’

  A ‘pfft’ from Verdeaux and Rudy shrugged, dropping his arms to his outer thighs.

  Naomi sank into the snow, a pair of gardening shears now visible even in the poor light. The shears were sticking out prominently from between her shoulder blades.

  And I, Maggy Thorsen, mother of Eric, promised myself and my son that I wouldn’t join her.

  At least, not that day.

  Chapter 26

  ‘Imaginative,’ I said, backing away. Naomi Verdeaux lay in the snow, her head turned sideways, her eyes staring and already starting to cloud over. I’d been too late at every stage. I wondered how long he’d stood there, holding her.

  ‘First, Luc’s meat cleaver,’ I said, backing up farther, ‘then a bullet from...whose gun?’

  ‘Hank Goddard’s hunting rifle.’ Rudy was staring down at Naomi’s body. When he looked up at me, his eyes were blank. ‘It was in the bathroom. Gloria was careless to leave it there. Somebody could have gotten hurt.’

  Fine time to worry. ‘But why Aurora, Rudy? And why Way in the first place?’

  ‘He took it from me.’

  ‘Took what?’ I was biding my time, hoping for sunrise. I didn’t know what I expected. Pavlik on a garbage truck, plowing to my rescue?

  ‘Everything!’ Suddenly Rudy’s voice rumbled like a thunderclap from the storm in the cold, dark lot. His eyes weren’t blank anymore, and he raised his fist to the sky. ‘I counted. I was important. First, Way Benson took my town chairmanship. Then he took her.’

  Rudy glanced down at his latest victim. Crumpled as Verdeaux was, she could almost be kneeling. Kneeling at his feet. Rudy would like that.

  ‘Then they took my shop, the two of them.’ He spat on Verdeaux’s body.

  I started forward before reminding myself that Naomi was beyond feeling the insult. And it could get me killed.

  Rudy looked up and something in his eyes ignited. It looked like ‘wrath’. Dante called it ‘love of justice perverted to revenge’.

  Perverted was right.

  Rudy kept ranting. ‘Way told me what they’d done, you know, when I saw him outside. That Naomi had set out to get me to sign over my lease. And, with her...charms, she succeeded.’

  Rudy looked like he was going to spit again.

  ‘But maybe Way was lying,’ I tried. By now I’d managed to retreat one small, slow step at a time, to the barbershop’s front window. ‘Naomi loved you. Truly.’ Hogwash, but I figured it was worth a try.

  Or not.

  Rudy laughed in the same humorless way he had just before he dropped Naomi’s body. ‘What do you think I am, an idiot?’

  ‘No. No, of course not.’ A homicidal maniac, maybe, but not an idiot.

  ‘But again, Rudy: why Aurora?’

  A shrug. ‘My only slip-up. I mistook her for Naomi because of Aurora being all bundled up in Naomi’s coat.’ Another shrug. ‘Mistakes do happen, you know.’

  Smiling - grimly, but smiling - I tried to see into his shop window.

  ‘Don’t bother. They’re gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ Terror pooled in the pit of my stomach. Eric? Could Rudy possibly have...

  He gestured toward what was left of Benson Plaza. ‘I told them the roof, over even my place, was going down and I sent them to Uncommon Grounds. Told them to wait there while I went to find Naomi.’

  Another glance at her body. ‘I found her.’ A grin directed toward me. ‘And now, you’ve found me.’

  I didn’t like the logic he saw in closing the circle.

  I slid along the front of the store under the eaves to the corner, then turned and ran toward Uncommon Grounds.

  In truth, it was more slogging than running, so I chanced a glance over my shoulder. Rudy had already rounded the corner, but he had to contend with the snow, too, and I was younger than he was. I would make it to Uncommon Grounds and even if the door was locked, I could...

  I slammed smack-dab into Pavlik’s Harley parked on the sidewalk, tipping it over and landing me face down in the snow.

  Again.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago, when I’d run out of An’s and fell before I saw Rudy with Naomi. If I’d reacted faster, if I hadn’t stupidly gotten myself stuck in the freezer, could I have been there in time to save her life?

  I didn’t know, but I was damned if I was going to let Rudy get away with the lives of three people. Four, counting me. And then what? Would he kill everyone in the mall like one of those psycho misfits who storm schools and malls, clutching a gun and wanting to be someone?

  Would he kill Eric? And Frank?

  I lifted my face out of the slush and, in a moment of déjà vu, saw Rudy again. This time, though, he was silhouetted by the sun just starting to peek up over the horizon.

  Dawn. And no snowplow. Worse, no Pavlik.

  Worst of all, Rudy was still coming, maybe the ability to wade through those flooded rice paddies holding him in good stead now in the deep snow.

  I screamed and tried to scramble to my feet, but one leg, from knee to foot, was pinned beneath the motorcycle. Turning on my side, I tried to get leverage to squirm out from under the Harley.

  As I did, Rudy leapt over the bike. Damned if all that work at the gym hadn't paid off. His physical prowess wasn’t what worried me, though. Rudy had a straight razor in his hand. Open, like a jackknife.

  Shades of Sweeney Todd.

  Starring Johnny Depp. Rent that one, too.

  I put my arm up to protect my throat and face against Rudy’s first slash. His blade caught in Aurora’s thick coat. Swearing, he grabbed my arm and tried to pull it away from my face. I resisted, rolling face down.

  As I did, a final clap of thunder sounded overhead.

  And then silence.

  Cautiously taking my arm down, I saw Mrs G, handbag in her left hand and the revolver from the cash register in her right.

  Chapter 27

  Eric and Oliver came forward to lift the motorcycle while Jacque helped me slide my leg out from under.

  Luc took the gun Mrs G offered him. I probably should have felt better with the revolver in experienced hands. On the other hand, the widow of a deer hunter had done herself - and him - proud.

  ‘You saved my life, you know,’ I told Mrs G. ‘And maybe everybody else’s.’

  She waved me off. ‘Hank was the one with the hunting permit. If I fired a gun a dozen times in my life, that was a lot. He must have guided my hand.’

  If Hank was aiming from heaven, he must have been one hell of a sharpshooter. The bullet struck Rudy in the shoulder, the impact knocking him sideways and away from me.

  Rudy was groaning as Mrs G moved away, and I had an urge to kick snow in his face. He’d killed three people because his ego had been bruised and now he was whining?

  Though whining and screaming admittedly had their place. Apparently my screaming had brought a posse: one sheepdog, seven survivors armed with Uncommon Grounds coffee cups and butter knives, and one old lady toting a lethal weapon.

  ‘Are you OK, Mom?’ Eric asked
me anxiously.

  I threw my arms around him. ‘I am so sorry I yelled at you because of the pop-top.’

  ‘Honestly? I kind of liked it.’ He pulled back so he could look at me.

  ‘You know, I kind of liked it, too,’ I admitted. ‘It was...’

  ‘Normal,’ Eric finished for me.

  And normal was good. Normal was better than good.

  I saw Oliver standing nearby, listening. He looked away, embarrassed.

  I beckoned him over. ‘Your Mom and Dad did love you, you know.’

  Oliver tried to say something, but the words turned into a sob.

  Eric and I, with one arm around the other, reached out to pull Oliver into a three-way clinch.

  ‘Group hug,’ Eric called, and I felt Oliver’s body relax at Eric’s light tone.

  The younger boy’s forehead was pressed against my shoulder. He sniffled once and took a deep breath. ‘Did Eric tell you?’

  Now Eric tensed up.

  Go with the flow. ‘He tried to. But I didn’t give him the chance.’

  Oliver nodded and cleared his throat. ‘I...umm, I did something bad.’

  ‘Let me guess. You and a friend on bikes broke into a bunch of cars. You stole Sophie Daystrom’s keys and the two of you let yourselves into The Bible Store.’ I figured that pretty much covered it.

  Oliver tried to back out of the clinch, but I didn’t let him.

  Eric knew me well enough to just keep quiet.

  ‘A Bible Store, Oliver?’ I was trying to understand.

  ‘Petey said we would just look around, but―’

  Wait a second.

  ‘Petey? The kid who shovels my snow?’ Or didn’t, most of the time. This was the ‘mystery man’ who knocked me down? Wait until I got hold of him.

  ‘Yeah, I―’

  ‘You stay away from Petey,’ I hissed. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I ummm...’

  On a roll, I turned to Eric. ‘And you. No littering.’

  He wisely took a page out of Oliver’s book. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘And...stay safe, do you hear me?’ Even I heard the crack in my voice.

  Eric squeezed me hard. ‘I will. Don’t worry.’