It sounded like it might’ve been all right, so long as he didn’t go shit-smearing insane from boredom.
Clay didn’t wait in his seat for the cop to come right up.
With a groan, he shifted sideways, grabbed his service revolver from under the seat, and pocketed it. The obscenely colorful frost on his torn shirt and exposed stomach cracked loose and disintegrated. He zipped up his jacket knowing he had to make some kind of play before the cop ran his plates.
There was still a little time left, maybe just enough for him to finish the job. He patted Kathy’s hand, rubbing at the small rosebud tattoo on her wrist and upsetting the flies. “Nice place up this way. You can smell them cooking cider in the valley. This could’ve worked for us, I think. Christ, Kath, they got oak trees all lined up and down the roads like an estate.”
It was tough leaning over into the passenger seat, but he had to snatch another wad of paper towels before he did anything else. Clay wiped his sweaty face down with them, and then jammed a handful up under his jacket against his rotting belly. The stink of his own shit oozing over his belt buckles gave him the dry heaves again but there was nothing left to bring up. Straining, he managed to clamber out of the car without letting loose a scream.
The cop couldn’t have been more then twenty-one at the outside, rail-thin but trying to puff his chest out, showing off the badge with pride. Bet he polished it every night before his bedtime prayers. Tremendous shoulders that proved he did plenty of military presses in the gym, spent at least four days a week on the machines. The kid was new enough on the job that he still chased after every small street infraction he found on the road. It was a pretty good way to buoy your manhood, Clay remembered, until you saw your first shotgun victim. You quit worrying about writing up tickets for loose mufflers right around then.
Crew cut, blonde hair, but with a touch of Asian in his features. He had no radio on his belt, and Clay had watched him park and get out. He hadn’t called in the stop. The hell kind of county was this? What sort of training program did they give the rookies up here before sending them into the sheriff’s department or the state patrol? The kid didn’t even unsnap his holster, didn’t place his hand on his gun.
They were five hours out of Brooklyn, and it was a whole other world.
“Please get back into your car, sir. I need to see your license and registration.”
“Sure, Officer,” Clay said. “Gotta make the streets safe.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice-amazing how the old habits could bubble up even now, with Edward eyeing him from the back seat.
“Excuse me?”
“Never know when those produce smugglers might come through and try to filch a few apples.”
“Sir, there’s no need to take that tone with me.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“License and registration please, sir.”
“Just take a second.”
Only a slight breeze stirred the treetops, and the grass of the meadows gently rippled as if some unnamable sorrow or beauty were slowly shrugging closer. The kid hadn’t even looked inside Clay’s car yet. These people up here weren’t prepared for anything.
Clay’s wallet had been soaked through with blood and digestive juice, and the contents had dried together into a filthy lump. If he could just work the leather flaps open and get his badge out, maybe the ignorant cop would get back into his cruiser and go home and mow his lawn for the third time this week.
But the flies started coming after Clay, and the wind shifted enough so that the kid finally glanced up and furrowed his brow.
“What’s that smell?”
“I don’t smell anything.” Clay tried pulling his wallet open again but flakes and chunks of his own shit fell to the ground. The flies kept after him-he hadn’t shut the car door all the way and the heat had roused the insects inside. They congregated now on the window, crawling over the glass. The buzzing grew louder.
“Jesus…what…?” The kid said the name “Jesus” the same way that Clay’s mother and grandmother used to, with reverence and a hint of very real fear.
“Okay, I lied,” Clay said. “That would be me. Peritonitis.” His fist was crusted with black blood from his seeping intestines.
The young cop started to pick up on the fact that something bad was going on here that he’d never run into before. He took his ticket book and held it out in front of him as if it might help him to figure out exactly what was happening. He still thought all the answers were in the manual. The kid’s mother probably had a pumpkin pie waiting for him on the kitchen table, fresh out of the oven.
A rush of rage and jealousy burst inside Clay. His mouth began to frame his son’s name but he couldn’t speak it aloud.
“Jesus God,” the kid whispered as he started to choke, trying to hold down his puke. “The flies. Your car.”
“Yeah, it’s getting pretty rank in there.”
The kid spotted Kath in the passenger seat, her ashen face slack but inflexible, still beautiful in its own way. Clay watched the cop turning now, looking through the back window at Edward strapped into the car seat, lips black, and his once tiny face now bloated to three times its normal size. The crushed Chihuahua was lying near his lap, almost bent in two, with its muzzle frozen into a snarl. Edward’s eyes were half-open and somehow sharply focused into a bitter glare.
“They’re…”
“I’m a New York City Homicide Detective,” Clay said. He’d never sounded more ridiculous in his entire life.
The young cop drew his gun and pointed it with a trembling hand at Clay’s chest. Finally a reaction that Clay could understand. It instantly relaxed and comforted him. Maybe he’d brought a little of Brooklyn along with him.
“Why don’t you do your job, kid?” Clay said, holding his wet and slithery stomach, surprised at the frenzy in his own voice. He thought he’d been holding up pretty good until then, considering. “There’s a killer on the loose.”
“What? Who?”
The young cop tried to keep it together but he started to gag, lips quivering, eyes damn near popping out of his head. He covered his mouth with one palm and turned his face aside, trying to keep the gun steady, but his mother must’ve fed him a greasy breakfast with lots of bacon and juice, and it all came up in roaring waves.
While the kid was barfing, Clay took three steps over, smacked him to get his attention, and took the gun away. Clay wasn’t moving too well, and he was weak as hell, but the last few days had given him a new resolve.
Hey, you did what you had to do.
“What’s your name?”
The cop wiped ropy strands off his chin and said, “Officer Yahmi.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“My father’s from Indochina. You need medical attention. You’re going to keel over any second.”
“I’ll make it long enough.”
“To do what?”
“What’s your first name?”
“Thomas.”
It stopped Clay. “Tommy?” he said. Then the laughter boiled up in him, a squealing acid that felt like it was tearing him in half, but still he couldn’t stop. “Tommy Yahmi?”
It hurt the kid’s feelings, laughing at him like that. He chewed his lower lip, trying to get tough inside, deal with everything the way he knew he should’ve been able to, but he came up short. Could bench press 350 easily but this took his breath away.
Clay kept guffawing for another ten seconds and then the reality of the situation came pouring back in, and his laughter stopped as if someone had cut his throat.
Tommy Yahmi was doing a few things right at least. He hadn’t panicked yet and he was trying to keep Clay talking. “You really with the NYPD?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing this for?”
“There’s no way to make this sound hip, really, but you just wouldn’t understand. You would’ve had to be there, and you’d better thank Christ that you weren’t.”
�
�Thank you, Jesus,” he said, and he meant it too.
“Do that later.” Clay checked the kid’s service .38. “I need your extra ammo.”
“Please, mister…I haven’t done anything to you…please…”
“Relax, only scumbags kill a man with his own gun.” Clay grabbed the cop’s extra clip, stunned to see it was a speed-loader. Something else that made the rookies feel slick. “I don’t suppose you have a throwaway or a back-up piece.”
“A what?”
“Forget it. Give me your cuffs.”
“In the cruiser.”
“You dumbass. Always keep them on your belt.”
Clay used his pocket knife to cut the radio cord in the cruiser and snatched up the cuffs. He jammed Tommy Yahmi’s night stick through the steering wheel and braced it against the column, threw the car into drive and let it slowly arc to the right and roll down the embankment.
The police car hit the end of the slope, went over into a ravine and was out of sight among the brush in two seconds. He couldn’t help wondering how many bodies might be hidden there as well. You never knew where Chuckie Fariente’s crew might be burying them.
So far, he and the young cop had been out here for fifteen minutes already and not another vehicle had passed. Clay looked up and down the highway and saw nothing.
“Is that your family?” Tommy Yahmi asked, still hoping to get the conversation moving a little.
“Yeah.”
“What happened to them?”
“It’s a little too long for me to get into right now.”
“What are you doing?”
“Finishing what somebody else started.”
“You need-”
“Get lost Tommy Yahmi,” Clay said, waving him away with the two pistols. The kid just kept staring. “Start walking. Go home and eat your pie and ice cream. Tell Mom I said hello.”
“Let me help you.”
“Got a man I need to see first.”
A wave of dizziness washed over Clay as he climbed back into his ’89 Caprice and got behind the wheel. He’d always hated the cramped space before, but now he welcomed it, feeling closer to Kath and Edward than he had in months. Protected on all sides.
He drove for about three miles before he saw a pile of roadkill on the shoulder. Clay had no idea what the animal had been, but he pulled over, pried its smashed furry body up with the toe of his shoe, grabbed the thing and tossed it onto the floor of the back seat.
There now. He got back in and started hunting for Rocco Tucci again, while his liver slid another inch to the left.
CHAPTER TWO
Sometimes you can surprise the hell out of yourself, stepping into a scene like this and still not losing all your cool.
So he’d walked in the door to see Kath lying there on the couch with a pink scrunchie tied tightly around her arm, the syringe on the floor but the broken needle still jabbed in a vein.
Her chest was covered in vomit, one thickly encrusted breast exposed. Legs wide open, knees bent and propped with her feet wedged into the corner cushions. The torn panties had been thrown across the room and hung off one of her high school cheerleading trophies on the mantel. Clay could tell she was dead by the effortless, smooth look of serenity and release in her slumped body.
A blur of motion broke to his left. He turned, reaching for his gun, and recognized the face-pissant hustler from the neighborhood name of Rocco Tucci. Chuckie Fariente must’ve hired him, paid him off with a few grams of skag. God damn it, nobody took care of their own business anymore.
Rocco was holding one of Clay’s throwaway .32s. He must’ve been in the house for a while, tearing the place apart, to have found it inside the cutaway panel behind the night stand. If he’d kept digging he would’ve discovered two others, all with their serial numbers filed off, untraceable. Rocco gave a quick smirk of triumph, aimed from his hip, and pulled the trigger.
Lunging forward, Clay let out a bark of fury even before the agony exploded in his belly. The force drove him back against the wall and he almost went through the cheap plaster before he dropped to the carpet. The smell of his own cooking flesh filled Clay’s nostrils and nearly made him go into a fit of sneezing. Rocco grinned and Clay could guess why. There was a man-shaped hole in the stucco. Must’ve looked pretty damn funny from where the bastard was standing.
Rocco fired twice more but he was coming down off his high and the fear had started to get hold of him. Both shots went wild, striking the floor on either side of Clay’s head. The screen door banged shut, and Rocco’s terrified footsteps receded down the sidewalk to where he’d parked his car in the shopping center at the end of the block.
As Clay lay there, still trying hard not to sneeze, he heard Mrs. Fusilli’s yapping Chihuahua, Cuddles, barking its little ass off next door. The thing didn’t stop for ten seconds all day long. It was no wonder the neighborhood was filling up with addicts-listening to that mutt would drive you out of your head if you weren’t on your way already.
“Cuddles,” he whispered into the rug, tasting fuzz, “give it a rest.”
Clay heard the sound of gushing and couldn’t believe he was still alive with that much blood running out. The worst he’d ever seen was a guy who’d had his throat slit by his teenage son in an argument over the best wide receiver in the league. You never knew what could do it to you.
Guy was lying in a two-inch deep pool, vocal cords sliced through, but still flailing and trying to talk. Clay was the first on the scene and just kneeled there with his fingers stuck in the man’s carotid and jugular veins, doing his best to plug the holes, arterial pressure blasting blood all over the place. But the guy just wouldn’t die.
Maybe it was like that here.
Clay looked down shocked to see that there was hardly any blood at all. The wound was nearly cauterized by the bullet. His flesh sizzled but the rip was there, opening wider. He’d never been shot before, not even nicked, in his fifteen years on the force, but he’d heard about this kind of thing happening on occasion. You heard it all eventually. After being shot you joined a different kind of club, stuck behind a desk usually, and had nothing to do but tell stories.
Clay’s shirt smoldered and threads of smoke twined into his face. He gasped and managed to shift and turn over to smother the sparks. He thought about just going to sleep right then, but the water was running.
“Oh Christ,” he begged, “no…”
He’d heard the bath.
Overflowing.
You do what you have to do, there’s nothing else. He tried to make it to his feet but wasn’t quite there yet.
So he crawled to his son.
Edward bobbed face-down in the water, with his blonde hair floating above like a golden lily-pad, wreathing his crown. Fingers of his left hand were touching the side of the tub the way a swimmer would reach for the edge of a pool. His other hand lay beneath him, bent awkwardly under his chest. The red and blue toy boats had drifted out of the flooding tub and now lay sideways, trapped under a steady stream of soapy water sluicing onto the floor.
His boy’s naked back had broken the surface and was dry and warm to the touch. Clay placed his palm there and wanted to leave it for a while, but he realized he still had motions he had to go through.
In his career he’d saved perhaps a half dozen people through CPR. He worked on his son for fifteen minutes-mouth to mouth, thumping and massaging his chest, pounding at his boy’s heart. He thought he might be crying but wasn’t sure and didn’t want to check.
Every now and then a whine slid deep within him but it wasn’t like any sound he’d heard before. It could be a different kind of death rattling around, hungry and mewling and wanting out, but Clay kept a tight hold. He wasn’t going to go yet, and he continued working at his boy until he couldn’t take the frozen, insane glare in Edward’s eyes anymore.
Clay kneeled with his forehead to his son’s face, the fiery pain in his belly growing and the flames clawing up through him to settle in his brain. Some
thing in his chest throbbed for a moment and then a sob broke. Clay threw his head back and thought he might howl like a dying dog, but all that came out was a guttural snarl.
Taking the towel from the rack, Clay dried his boy carefully. He was beginning to move a little better now-the vicious twinges of pain made him grunt and gnash his teeth, but at least he could stand. He headed back to the living room, stumbling and shouldering his way along the walls, seeing clues everywhere and knowing exactly what had happened.
It was a wicked way to go through the world. Always capable of putting the pieces together quickly, in the correct order. A hell of a talent when he needed it, and something much uglier the rest of the time.
He could picture how it happened, all right, that’d always been the easy part-walking through the crime scene, adding one fact on top of the other. The angle of blood spatter, heaving arc of the knife.
His father had been the same way-the man would wander in and glance into your face, and he’d know everything you’d been doing, everything you might be trying to hide. On the job thirty years until he’d retired to Fort Lauderdale, started planting flowers and tending fruit trees. He was dead six months later with a head full of tumor.
Clay nearly went down. His own brain was stuffed with rot now. He twisted sideways, came to a rest against the edge of the couch, and felt the blackness welling up behind his eyes. His mostly digested breakfast trickled out of his torn guts and between his fingers.
The urge to sit beside Kathy grew overwhelming. Another moment to play house, just fade off into the night and pretend it was all going to work out on the other side of hell. He tugged her feet free from under the cushion, sat, and laid her legs across his stinking lap.
“Just need a minute to rest,” he said. “But I swear, it isn’t over. Trust me. This isn’t how it’s going to end, baby.”
He hadn’t called her that in a while. Things had begun creeping downhill again the past couple of months, and he still wasn’t certain why. His fault probably-a better than fair chance at that. He had fallen into cliché, which was something he’d been hoping to avoid all his life, but failing at most of the time. At thirty-seven, his middle age crisis had sprung out at him from behind a fucking bush and sent him sprawling. He tumbled into the predictably routine dismay of having more of his life behind him now than out in front. Where was the grace and wisdom you were supposed to find as your gray patches started to fill in? He didn’t know.
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