Night Mask

by William W. Johnstone

  A man dressed all in black leather and chains, his crotch exposed, stepped into the storeroom and stared at Dick for a moment, not believing what he was seeing.

  “Perverted son of a bitch!” Dick shouted, his words not audible over the music. Neither was the booming of the shotgun.

  The face of the S & M lover disappeared in a splash of red and gray. Blood and brains splattered the walls of the storeroom. Headless now, the man slid down to the floor. Dick noticed the dead man had an erection.

  Leo, Lani, and Brenda were about a mile away from the private club, driving slowly, for the mist had turned into a downpour.

  Dick walked to the doorway and looked out at the scene. “Disgusting,” he muttered. Naked men were dancing on the stage. Some were fondling each other. Two were engaged in some sort of bizarre sexual act. Dick couldn’t figure out exactly what they were doing. He’d never seen anything like it. It looked like some grotesque naked beast hunching on the floor. Dick lifted the shotgun and emptied it at the men on the stage.

  It was carnage. The patrons, many of them in various stages of undress, went into a panic as blood and brains splattered onto their nakedness. Those on the stage who were wounded and still able to walk or crawl, jumped and fell from the stage, landing on those below them, slicking the men and women and the floor and tables with blood.

  Quickly reloading, Dick leveled the shotgun at a leather-clad man who jumped at him. The heavy charge knocked the man backward and under the bar, where his falling body tore loose the hoses from kegs of beer. Beer under pressure spewed out and into the air, adding to the screaming confusion.

  Leo turned the car onto the parking lot of the club.

  Dick emptied the shotgun into the panicked crowd, then pulled out his pistols, and started firing. One of the wild slugs killed the DJ and he fell across his control board, abruptly stilling the throbbing music.

  Leo, Lani, and Brenda were just stepping out of the car when the music died, the front door burst open, disgorging dozens of panicked people in various styles of dress and undress, and the sounds of gunfire could be heard.

  Inside the club, Dick had slammed home fresh clips and was shooting at anything that moved, male or female, and in many cases, it was impossible to tell. Half a dozen people rushed him, and Dick emptied the. 45 into the knot of men. Two of the badly wounded men staggered on and fell against Dick, almost knocking him to the floor. Dick cursed them and threw them aside. He was bloody now, and spattered with the still spewing beer.

  Leo, Lani, and Brenda could not get into the club because of the rush of people trying to get out. Leo grabbed a woman, who turned out to be a man, showed him his badge, and shouted, “What the hell’s going on in there?”

  “Dick Hale,” the transvestite replied in a deep voice. “He’s gone mad. Killing everybody in sight. So go do something, you pig motherfucker.”

  Leo shoved her/him away and ran toward the club, pistol drawn, Lani and Brenda right behind, pistols in hand. “I’ll take the back!” Lani shouted.

  “Go with her, Brenda!”

  “Ten-four!” Brenda called and rounded the corner of the club, right behind Lani.

  The club had just about emptied when Leo bulled his way to the front door. He had never seen so many strange-looking people in his life. And one of them was a senior sergeant on the La Barca PD. He was really quite stunning in a yellow dress and a large flowery hat. Sort of resembled that lady who used to do the banana commercial on TV.

  “Sergeant Dixson,” Leo greeted the ... whatever it was.

  “Screw you, Leo. I’m off.”

  “Certainly looks like it,” Leo retorted, and ran through the doorway, staying low.

  Dick spotted him and cracked off a round, the slug going wide of Leo.

  “Drop the gun, Dick. Drop the goddamn gun!” Leo yelled.

  “Hell with you, copper!” Dick said, doing a pretty good imitation of James Cagney.

  Leo’s finger tightened on the trigger, and Dick suddenly dropped to the body-littered floor, scooping up his shotgun.

  “Oh, shit!” Leo muttered, diving behind a door that led to the coat and hat closet.

  “Well, excuse me!” a voice said, just as Dick’s shotgun boomed and the slugs knocked a very large hole in the plaster.

  Leo looked. It was a woman, crouched on the floor, her evening dress hiked up to her waist. He lowered his eyes. Wrong again.

  “See anything you like,” the man asked.

  “You got to be kidding!”

  Dick’s shotgun boomed, and a scream came from the rear of the club.

  “Brenda’s down!” Lani yelled.

  “Back up should be here any second,” Leo called.

  Dick started shooting out the lights.

  “I have this huge erection,” the man in the evening dress said. “Violence turns me on. Look, look!”

  Leo would rather face the shotgun. He left the cloakroom in a rush and bellied down on the floor, worming his way toward several overturned tables. “Goddamn loony bin!” he muttered.

  Ted Murray had heard the call and was the first officer to respond. He rushed inside, staying low. Dick spotted him and cut loose, the buckshot just missing Ted.

  “Don’t jump in the cloakroom!” Leo yelled.

  Too late.

  “Great god!” Ted hollered as Dick resumed his shooting out of the lights. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for Ted, he couldn’t shoot out the light in the cloakroom.

  Ted left the small room a hell of a lot faster than he had entered, and that was pretty swift. He scooted across the floor, over to Leo.

  “I tried to warn you,” Leo said.

  Ted was too shocked to reply.

  “Brenda’s down, Ted. I don’t know how bad.”

  Dick shot out the last light in the normally poorly lit club, and the huge room was plunged into darkness.

  Chapter 16

  “Brenda’s all right!” Lani called. “Just a small cut on her forehead. The bullet must have fragmented when it hit something, and she caught just a small piece of it.”

  The sounds of screaming sirens touched those inside the private club. The smell of smoke reached them at just about the same time.

  “Get out, Lani, Brenda!” Leo called. “The fool has started a fire.”

  The man in the dress in the cloakroom let out a squawk, jumped up, and ran out the front door, the front of his dress all poked out.

  “Go!” Leo said to Ted. “Move! I’m right behind you.” Outside, Leo yelled to several uniforms, “Cover the back and both sides. Radio in for fire trucks.”

  Within seconds, the old building was a wall of flames. The smell of human flesh bubbling and sizzling was sickening. The heat was so intense, the police and fire fighters were forced to back up.

  “No one will get out of that,” the fire captain said, raising his voice over the roar of the flames and the crackling and collapsing of walls. “But this rain will keep it from spreading.”

  The press showed up and captured it all on film. But nearly all of the patrons of the Cock ‘n’ Balls had left the scene immediately upon fleeing the building. Only the hard core remained, and they were vocal. Very vocal.

  Leo had said nothing about running into Ms. Banana, otherwise known as Sergeant Dixson. He would share that information with Lani, later on. But he probably would not tell Ted.

  Over Brenda’s very loud protests, she had been loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. The attending EMT had said her wound looked very slight, but she would probably be kept for twenty-four hours under observation. Just to be on the safe side.

  The rain had stopped, the storm sweeping eastward very fast, and the night had turned clear and starry.

  Ted had gone back to his motel room. Said he wanted to take a very long, very hot shower. His minute and a half in the cloakroom had unnerved him.

  “You think Dick Hale was the Ripper?” a reporter asked Leo.

  “No.”

  “Do you feel at al
l responsible for this terrible tragedy?” another asked.

  Leo looked at the crap-for-brains reporter for a few seconds, and then walked off without dignifying the question with any sort of reply. “Idiot,” he muttered to Lani.

  Out of earshot of the press, Lani said, “I heard a window breaking just after we smelled the smoke. I think Dick got out. Or at least somebody did.”

  “Another nut on the loose,” Leo replied. “Hell with this. Let’s go make our reports and go home.”

  * * *

  The pair known as the Ripper sat in their den and laughed at the news reports of the many deaths at the local nightclub. It was wonderful news. They had felt sure that Dick Hale would do something, but they had not dreamed it would be this delightful.

  “I’m so excited,” one said, taking the other’s hand.

  “Me, too,” the other said, gently squeezing the hand.

  “Shall we?”

  “Let’s.”

  They wandered off to the bedroom.

  * * *

  The official death count at the Cock ‘n’ Balls was twenty-two dead and thirty-five wounded. Some of the wounded were not expected to live. And some very prominent people from various communities all up and down the coast had been in attendance.

  “Who all did you see in that loony bin?” Sheriff Brownwood asked Leo the next day. He closed the door and sat down, speaking to Ted and Brenda and Lani. Brenda had a small bandage over her right eye.

  Leo looked at Ted, and said to hell with his original decision. “Sergeant Dixson for one.”

  “Al Dixson? The Bull?”

  “Yeah. In a yellow evening gown with a big, floppy, flowery hat. Looked like Chiquita Banana. With a five o’clock shadow.”

  “Could he have been working undercover?” the sheriff asked.

  Brenda giggled.

  Leo looked over at Ted. “I don’t know who that was in the cloakroom.”

  “What’s this about a cloakroom?” Brenda asked, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

  “Yeah,” the sheriff said. “What about a cloakroom?”

  Ted folded his arms across his chest and looked like a thundercloud.

  “Ted had an encounter with a person in the cloakroom, while Dick was shooting at us,” Leo said. “Did he show you his erection, Ted?”

  “I’m leaving,” Brownie said, standing up. He looked at Leo. “Question is: did he show you his erection?”

  “Yeah,” Leo said straight-faced.

  Brownie shook his head. “I worry about you, Leo. Maybe you should call your wife and tell her to cut short her visit with her sister and come on back home.” He walked out of the office.

  Brenda was just about to bust wide open with laughter.

  “I’m warning you, Brenda,” Ted said, cutting his eyes at her. “You’re pushing your luck.”

  “What’d I say?” she asked innocently. “What’d I say?”

  * * *

  The Ripper didn’t let a little minor fire and twenty-two deaths put a damper on fun. Leo received a package at the office promptly at eight o’clock, and very nearly lost his breakfast when he opened it. Inside was the severed right arm of what appeared to be a white female, probably in her late teens, with no identifying marks or scars. About an hour later, a local delivery service brought another package to the sheriff’s office, addressed to Lani. Inside was the left arm. Just before noon, two packages were placed at the rear door of the building and discovered by a motorcycle cop who’d come in the back way. They were addressed to Ted Murray and Brenda Yee. The boxes contained the left and right legs.

  “I don’t even want to think about where the torso and head will show up,” Brownie said, to the team at lunch. They were all brown-bagging it and sitting in the break room.

  “Sheriff?” a deputy stuck his head into the room. “There’s a big box sitting out in the parking lot. It’s got your name on it.”

  Brownie looked at his half-eaten ham and cheese. “Shit!” he said.

  The box contained the torso of the girl. But no head.

  The torso was turned over to the lab people, and they quickly concluded that the girl had been sexually assaulted and savagely beaten.

  The press played it up big, insinuating—not too subtly—that the police were so inept that they couldn’t catch a cold. One newspaper reporter, Agnes Peters—who was so left-leaning many wondered how she managed to stand up straight—was particularly harsh with the city and county police. She had learned, somehow, about Dennis Potter’s financing of Leo and Lani’s trip East, and insinuated that the entire sheriffs department was in the pocket of the richest man in the county, there only to do his bidding. Agnes, it seemed, hated all rich people. She was a long and strong advocate of wealth redistribution (that’s spelled S-O-C-IA-L-I-S-T and occasionally D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T). Agnes concluded her venomous tirade by stating: Perhaps the police and sheriffs department doesn’t really want to catch the Ripper, since his prey have been overwhelmingly the poor, the minorities, and those who practice an alternate lifestyle.

  “I wasn’t aware that Ruthie Potter was poor, a member of any minority group, or practiced an alternate lifestyle,” Brownie said, after reading the column.

  “I’ll give Ms. Agnes Peters about seventy-two hours before she learns it’s not nice to fool with one of the richest people in the state, and probably one of the richest persons in America,” Lani remarked.

  Brownie shook his head. “I doubt that Dennis will do anything. If she had defamed Ruthie, he would buy the paper and fire her.”

  “He bought LGH Industries two years ago, and fired the plant manager after the man made repeated slurs about Ruthie’s character,” Brenda said softly. “I know. We investigated that buy-out for possible violations of several laws.”

  “The outcome?” Lani asked.

  “The case was suddenly ordered closed,” Ted said. “Dennis Potter’s power reaches very high.”

  “You don’t know the whole story,” Brownie said, glancing up. “The plant manager’s son was trying to get Ruthie to go out with him. He became very persistent, and Dennis warned the man to put the brakes on his son’s mouth and his stalking of Ruthie. The man cussed Dennis and said his son could do any damn thing he liked. The plant manager then started spreading rumors about Ruthie being a slut and a whore... and those were the nicest things he had to say. Dennis got tired of it. The only person to lose their job was the plant manager. Since Dennis’s buy-out, the employees have all been given raises, and the company is doing better than it ever did before. Dennis is Hancock County. He’s built parks and playgrounds for kids, given millions of dollars to local charities and schools. When the local police and this very sheriff’s department got in a money crunch last year, it was Dennis who bailed us all out. All his plants have free day-care for the kids of working mothers. Dennis’s good far outweighs whatever bad he might have. No, he’ll let this foolish reporter slide ... this time. But if she’s got any sense at all, she’ll never mention his name again. Dennis and I grew up together, in the migrant workers’ camps. I know him better than anyone. And he can be ruthless.”

  “What’s he really worth, Brownie?” Leo asked. “Do you know?”

  The sheriff smiled. “About five billion dollars. Dennis was one of the pioneers in the computer business. He invented about a half a dozen of some sort of gadgets. Then he started buying factories and land. You know the rest.” Brownie left the room just as a uniform walked in.

  “Five billion dollars,” Lani spoke the words softly. “I can’t even visualize that much money.”

  “Well, visualize this, Lani,” the uniform said. “They found the girl’s head. Over at St. Anthony’s on Elm Street. Just about freaked out the priest.”

  The four stood up and walked out silently.

  * * *

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” Leo muttered, staring up at the crucifixion on the wall behind the pulpit.

  The Ripper had tied the head of the girl over the face of Jesus. The face of
the girl was contorted by the last, hot moment of agony before death. Her tongue was blue/black, protruding out of swollen lips. Her eyes were bulging and horror-filled. She had been completely scalped, the whiteness of skull bone glistening in the dim light of the church.

  Several priests and nuns were murmuring low prayers in the shadows next to a wall.

  “Get pictures of it,” Leo said to a uniform. “Did you call the lab people?”

  “Right, and yes.”

  “We’ll assemble the body parts in the lab and try to ID the kid.”

  “What kind of person would do something like this, detective?” the older of the priests asked.

  Leo remembered the words of the ex-priest back in New York State. “A very evil person, Father. Evil through and through.”

  “There is good in everybody, my son,” the priest replied.

  Leo shook his head. “Not in the people who did this, Father. Not one shred of good in them.”

  “I pray you’re wrong.”

  “No, Father.” Leo pointed to the head of the girl. “Pray for her.”

  * * *

  “She was a runaway from a little town in Alabama,” Lani said, walking in and laying a teletype on Leo’s desk. “Seventeen years old. She must have come from a real loving home. Her parents said to bury her out here ... providing the state will pay for it. They don’t plan on coming out for the service.”

  Leo sighed, Ted looked very pained, Brenda shook her head at the callousness.

  “I put out some jars around the office to try to collect enough for a small headstone.”

  “I have a better idea,” Leo said. “I’ll see to it that Dennis Potter hears of this. Any word on Dick Hale?”

  “No. He’s dropped out of sight.”

  “He’ll surface,” Brenda said. “And he’ll start killing more homosexuals when he does. Our office did a psychological profile on him. Our in-house shrink says he blames gays for the death of his son. He said get ready for wholesale slaughter, if Dick stays on the loose.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right and he’s right.” Leo picked up a sheet of paper and held it so all could see. “Small sporting goods store out on the edge of town was broken into last night. Several cases of canned food and bottled water were taken. Along with about two hundred 12-gauge shotgun shells, a .38 pistol, and several boxes of ammo for that. Also missing was a tent, sleeping bag, camp axe, knife, and other survival gear. If it was Dick—and I’ll bet it was—looks like he’s going to head for the timber and work at night.”