Face flushed, I dug four twenties from my wallet and exchanged them for the room key. “Do you serve food here?”
“Not offseason, no.” She quickly counted the bills then slipped them into her back pocket and started back down the hallway. “There’s a restaurant couple doors down, might be open, hard to say.”
I rolled my suitcase into the room then closed the door, locked it and followed her back downstairs. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Maggie,” she said, stopping halfway down the staircase and looking back at me.
“I’m Derrick, Derrick Ricci. But I was going to ask if—”
“Yeah, I got a boyfriend. He’s doing time in Cali. Be back around next summer.”
“Actually, I’m looking for a friend of mine I think might be here, guy by the name of Caleb. Tall, skinny, lots of tattoos, long hair. Seen anyone like that around?”
“Ain’t seen nobody. I never do.” She turned and continued down the stairs. “Haven’t even seen you.”
* * * *
After having a beer and spending some quality time with the effervescent social butterfly that was Maggie, I left the bar in search of something to eat. The rain was still coming down in buckets, so I stayed close to the buildings and hurried along until I came upon the restaurant Maggie had told me about. Sandwiched between a liquor store and a novelty shop, it was a lunchroom-style joint that looked as if it had been transported there directly from the 1950s. Unfortunately it was dark and locked up tight. I peered through the rain, trying to take in as much of the strip as I could. In bright sunshine the area would’ve looked dreary enough, but in heavy rain and premature darkness it took on the bleak feel of a post apocalyptic ghost town.
I could only imagine what was hiding in the shadows here, behind those boarded up doors and dark windows.
Caleb’s here, I thought. I’d bet my life on it...if I haven’t already.
A gust of wind off the nearby ocean carried with it the unmistakable aroma of greasy food. I tracked the smell to a food concession stand built directly into the face of a nearby building. A row of fixed stools lined the counter, and beyond, a grill and kitchen area was visible. A squat, barrel-chested man in a stained apron and paper hat stood behind the counter watching me with small dark eyes, hands on his hips.
I crossed the street and took refuge at the counter. A large awning extended over the counter area, providing sufficient shelter from the rain. Upon closer inspection, the proprietor appeared to be in his fifties, with olive skin and a bushy mustache. He looked like Super Mario. He smiled revealing big square teeth. “Hello, Mister Man!”
I returned the smile and sat at the counter. Something I couldn’t quite make out was sizzling on the large grill behind him. “Quite a rain you’ve got going here.”
The man nodded, glanced to the sky. “Is bool-shit. Supposed to rain for days. No good.”
I tried to place his accent. He sounded like a cross between an Arab and a Russian. “Can I get a coffee?”
“Yes, my friend!” He grabbed a pot from a counter behind him, poured some into a plastic mug and slid it over to me. “You eat too, yes?” He pointed to a menu board suspended behind him and laughed. His stomach jiggled. “You like the sausage? OK! I make you sausage with peppers and onions! Is already cooking long time so you have quick. You get fries too. All one price.”
I nodded wearily. “Yeah, that’s fine, whatever. I’ll take that.”
A low rumble separated and rose above the sound of the rain. I leaned back and looked toward the far end of the strip to see a police cruiser slowly riding past.
“Cops,” the man grumbled. “I live in Sheppard Beach fifteen years, run my business, OK? Even in summer only time cops is around is if trouble. Now peoples get killed and they give shits. Bool-shit cops.”
I watched until the cruiser rounded the corner and vanished from sight then I turned back to the man, who had begun shuffling several fat sausages and piles of peppers and onions about the grill with a metal spatula. The food sizzled and popped, the smells wafting up toward me. I found it interesting that although I was clearly an outsider and one of only a handful of people here during a time when there was virtually no reason for me to be, neither Maggie nor this man had asked me why I had come to town. Apparently in places like Sheppard Beach people didn’t ask those kinds of questions, even when there was a murderer in their midst. Surely the locals were used to dealing with the underbelly of society, and while in reality they probably rarely missed anything, as Maggie had made abundantly clear, like some unspoken code, they acted as if they never saw or heard a thing. And they asked no questions.
“Yeah, I heard about those murders on the news,” I told him, “terrible thing.”
The man dropped a bucket of fries into a waiting bin of hot oil. “Man killed was my friend,” he said sullenly. “Good man, an old man. Never did nothing to nobody. Eighty-years-old. Here since early days. Was maître d’ at hotel back in old days. He eat here all the time, we sit and have coffee and eggs and talk. He walk on beach every morning, go back to cottage and some son-of-bitch kill him. I like to find cocksucker who did this. I strangle piece of shit.”
Not sure of what else to do, I raised my mug as a show of support. “The other victim was local too, right?”
“Woman from town.” He scooped peppers and onions into a hot dog roll. “Her I don’t know. She come from town to make paintings of beach. They find her dead on sand, ripped to pieces. Young woman with family. When she die cops care. News talk like it big-time story, OK? Cops all over place, and even FBI comes maybe.”
I watched as he loaded a plump and blackened sausage atop the peppers and onions then slid the entire thing onto a paper plate and put it before me.
“They’ve got no idea who did it or why?”
The man shook his head. “I think killer comes here and he hides, and then he kills these peoples and he run away like coward he is.” He pulled the basket from the fryer, shook the excess grease off and poured a pile of crinkle-cut fries onto my plate. “Five fifty.”
I threw him a twenty and took a bite of the sandwich. It wasn’t half bad.
“Vern,” the man said, pushing my change back across the counter, “he was good man. He was my friend. He don’t deserve to die like that, gutted in his house like pig, OK? Vern never hurt nobody, he was gentle man. And the woman, now her husband has no wife and children have no mother. Is wrong, my friend, is wrong.” He seemed to think about what he’d said a moment, then pointed a thick finger at me. “Whoever do this, he pay price before God. Don’t nobody escape God. Not even Devil can do this.”
I grabbed a napkin from a nearby holder and sopped up a trickle of grease from my chin. “I’m actually here to meet up with an old friend of mine.”
The man looked at me as if for the first time, his beady eyes dark and suddenly more intense than comical. I expected him to say something in response but he didn’t.
“Not sure if he’s here yet,” I continued. “Maybe you’ve seen him around.”
He remained silent while I took another bite of sandwich, washed it down with a swig of coffee, told him Caleb’s name then described him. Even before I’d finished I could tell the man had seen him, but he wasn’t about to tell me that. Not for free.
I slid my change back over to him. “Keep it,” I said. “You know, as a tip.”
He cautiously took the money, and after a moment, said, “I have seen this man. Day before yesterday he come here and has coffee.” As if for inspiration, the man casually rubbed his belly. “Your friend,” he said, taking two fingers and tapping the bend in his arm, “he does the drugs, yes?”
Though it shouldn’t have, his question caught me off guard. I nibbled a couple fries to kill time. “I don’t know, I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“He looks like homeless man, drug person, OK? Sick, like he need help, should be in hospital. I think he sleep on beach. He tells me cops talk to him, give him shit, so maybe he leave already, I don’t kn
ow. Cops give him bad time because he’s bum. He’s not killer, too weak and sick. Bool-shit cops don’t know fucking nothing.”
“If you run into him again, can you tell him Derrick’s here and has a room over at Maggie’s place?”
“If I see this man, I will tell him.”
“Thank you.” I held my hand out. “I’m Derrick, by the way.”
“Spiffy,” he said, and then in response to my confused reaction, pointed to his sign. “This is Spiffy Grill, see? I am Spiffy.”
I wanted to laugh, but smiled and shook his hand instead. His grip was crushing. The pain reminded me why I was there, and any chance of humor evaporated.
Thunder groaned in the distance, somewhere far out over the ocean. The rain kept up as storm clouds overhead grew thicker, leaving the strip darker and even more ominous than before. I thought about Jill back home in her tight black dress and heels, thought about Louie sitting at the cottage looking out the sliders at the birds and squirrels bopping around the backyard. And I thought about that poor little baby rabbit. I ate the rest of my sandwich, drank the rest of my coffee and watched Spiffy busy himself. Finally, I spun in my stool and gazed out at the end of the strip and the sand and crashing waves of the Atlantic beyond, and thought of his friend Vern and the young wife and mother who’d been found slaughtered down on the beach.
I had to find Caleb and I had to do it fast. Although it was only a matter of time before more killings took place and federal investigators got involved, many years had come and gone since the original murders, and even the experts at the FBI were unlikely to piece things together or have any realistic reason to tie these killings to those in the past. In addition, the two witnesses who had briefly caught a glimpse of the hobo killer all those years ago had described him as a man in his middle fifties, which meant he’d now be pushing ninety, hardly a believable age for a madman allegedly hopping moving trains and butchering his victims along the way. Just the same, the last thing I needed was this place crawling with feds, because while this killer certainly couldn’t be the Ragman of lore anymore than he could be the same person who’d terrorized our town in the distant past, this was no ordinary haunting—it never had been—and he was no ordinary ghost.
He was many things, but human wasn’t one of them.
FIVE
Down on the beach, on the sand, out in the open, the storm was worse, more violent, the wind heavier. I trudged through wet sand, stopping near a partially-buried tangle of yellow police tape, the far end of which twisted and fluttered in the wind like a living thing. I froze. This is where the second murder had taken place. The young woman had been butchered here, right where I was standing. She’d been face-to-face with the killer, the evil that had haunted Caleb and me for decades. Here, right here, she’d more than likely begged for her life before and even while he’d bled her, slashing and hacking and tearing her flesh. And she’d watched as The Ragman slaughtered her, her eyes wide and alive, seeing all of it, every spray of blood and bodily fluid. Here, right here, she’d fallen to the sand and taken her final breath. I wondered if she’d been facing the sea when she died. Were waves crashing shore the last thing she ever saw? In those final fleeting moments, did she think about her children, her husband, the painting she’d been working on? Did she wonder how or why this had happened? Did she feel guilty, sad or angry, or simply horrified and confused? Had she glimpsed God, come to rescue her amidst a blinding light of warmth and love? Or had she been greeted by deeper darkness, cold and empty and cruel? Either way, real violence was brutally final, an appalling affliction no one ever completely escaped, because living things never die without consequence. We only pretend they do.
I looked back at the strip and an old decaying band shell overlooking the beach. Concerts had been performed here for years, before hundreds of people sitting on blankets or in beach chairs. This had been a happy place once, a place of celebration and joy. But no traces of such things existed anymore. Alongside the band shell, against the concrete back of a large building, an artist had long ago painted an enormous mural depicting several pop culture icons. Their eyes looked down at me like a jury that had already decided my fate, and perhaps they had.
I pressed on, following the shoreline and looking for hiding places, clues that might indicate Caleb had been here at some point, perhaps living on the beach, or at a minimum, spending his nights here. At the far end of the beach, around the backside of a cement shower that looked as if it hadn’t been functional in decades, I found an old and frayed plastic poncho. Next to it, a few spent cans of baked beans, empty liquor bottles and numerous cigarette butts were scattered about. I crouched down and pulled back one corner of the poncho. A small length of rubber tubing, mostly rotted, lay next to a used book of matches and an old rusted spoon, the handle bent back. Residue still stained the bowl. I guess we all kept our demons at bay as best we could. I drank too much. Caleb filled his veins with heroin and drifted off to worlds where none of this shit mattered. And The Ragman, he fed his addictions too.
I stood up and closed my eyes in an attempt to collect myself, but all I saw was blood, all I heard was screams.
I opened my eyes, imagined Caleb here; huddled in the rain in that tattered poncho, shivering and trying to make it through the night. Christ Almighty, I thought, how had this happened? Truth was he’d been dying for a long time now, wasting away while I listened to him breath over long distance lines. I took the calls in the middle of the night, listened to his drunken, drugged out ramblings, made sure he knew I cared about him and did my best to convince him he needed to get himself into rehab, but at the end of the day, I never stepped in. The rain kept coming, soaking me to the bone as I forced myself to remember things I’d tried so hard to forget. Like the times he’d call in the dead of night, whispering to me that The Ragman was killing him, taking his soul little by little, or the afternoon I received a call from a stranger in New York City who’d found Caleb wandering Central Park in tears, lost and confused and so strung out he’d forgotten where he lived. In a frenzy of hysteria, he’d somehow remembered my cell phone number and given it to a woman who had taken pity on him and asked if she could help. Of course she had no idea she was calling someone in Massachusetts, and once she realized there was no way I could simply hop in the car and come get him, she was kind enough to take his address from me and put him in a cab. When I insisted she let me reimburse her for the price of the taxi, she refused and promised to handle it. The next day, I called Caleb’s apartment and he’d answered as if nothing was wrong. He had no idea how he’d gotten home, had no memory of the incident in the park and not a clue as to how fortunate he’d been that such a kind person had found him. I should’ve forced him to get help right then and there. I should’ve saved him. Instead, I spiraled deeper into my own problems and assured myself he’d be fine.
Only he wasn’t fine. He never had been.
How could either of us have known, all those years ago, that a few decades later, the bright, confident and wisecracking young man Caleb had once been would become little more than an end to a bad dream, a hopeless junkie drowning in his own sorrow and bloody delusions? Although back then people could’ve more comfortably assigned such a fate to me, while I’d never found the Shangri La we all believe our futures surely hold, I suppose I’d managed better than Caleb had. But that wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot. And the game wasn’t over yet.
Why does it have to be this way?
I looked beyond the edge of the beach to the section of forest abutting it. Several miles beyond the trees the town proper began. The woods reminded me of those back home, and Caleb’s whispers across time, when one afternoon we’d skipped school and sat in the forest talking. Caleb’s father had caught him doodling in one of his notebooks and hadn’t reacted well to the homoerotic drawings his son had been scribbling. Yelling hadn’t apparently been sufficient, so the little bastard had slapped Caleb from one end of the house to the other, dragging him around from room to room by
the scruff of his neck, announcing to the rest of the family how Caleb had been drawing “faggot pictures.” Humiliated and hurt, Caleb had fled the house and spent the night in the woods not far from his house. I’d found him there the next morning sitting in a clearing, exhausted and drawn.
“Why does it have to be this way?”
“It doesn’t.”
“I can’t wait to get out of here, to get away from this town and everyone in it.”
My problems were different, but I could relate. I wanted out too. “I hear you.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I can make it to graduation,” he told me.
“Maybe we don’t have to.”
He looked at me and smiled the way he often did when I’d said something he considered childishly amusing. “Of course we do. We’re sixteen, broke and live at home. Oh, yeah, sky’s the limit! The options are endless!”
“Want me to go over to your house and beat the shit out of your midget father?”
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Caleb shrugged uncomfortably and looked away, eyes moist. “He…he doesn’t understand, he thinks I’m sick, he…”
“Don’t defend him, Caleb.”
“He’s my father.”
“And you’re his son. You take enough shit at school and everywhere else.”
He wiped his eyes, forced a smile and said, “Let’s just go get drunk, OK?”
“Why don’t we leave?”
“What do you mean?”
“Right now, today, why don’t we just leave?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go home, get whatever money we have. Pack up a few things, get in my car and just get the hell out of here once and for all.”
A bevy of emotions drifted across Caleb’s face before he responded. “And where would we go? What would we do?” He clapped his hands and laughed. “You’re a stitch! What is wrong with you? We can’t just run away.”
Dreams The Ragman Page 3