The Bewdley Mayhem
Page 52
“Yeah.”
“Well apparently this missing boy was with them.”
“Oh yeah?”
“But then he disappeared right after I drove off. The kids say he was talking to you.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No. They all went off and I went right to bed.”
“But … but, I mean I thought I saw a kid, just as I jumped in the cruiser. A kid walking up to your front porch.”
“No, Brent. At least, I didn’t see him. Maybe the kids were scattering from that drunk driver barrelin’ down. Maybe you saw one of ’em running away over my lawn.”
“I don’t know. I could have sworn he was … and the kids said he was going up to tell you …”
“Well, he never got to my front door, Brent.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well, OK. I mean, if he didn’t, he didn’t. And that’s that. But, Christ, what the hell happened to him then?”
“Well, maybe Gorley, maybe he saw something and then Gorley got to him.”
“Gorley? Gorley? We had Gorley in the bucket at that point. No, it wasn’t Gorley.”
“Well, that’s what Faruzi was thinking.”
“Fuck Faruzi! Faruzi doesn’t know. Christ, Gorley was long gone by then.”
“Hmmm. I don’t know Brent.”
“Besides I thought you said Faruzi didn’t talk to you about this?”
“Oh, not explicitly no. He was talkin’ around things. I guess he did say a thing or two.”
“Robert, c’mon. I need to know what’s goin’ on here. Is Faruzi onto something? ’Cause if he’s talking to you, you have to talk to me.”
“Well, OK. OK. I think all of this should come out anyway.”
“Good, good. You tell me everything.”
“OK, Faruzi has this idea that Gorley has some control over these kids. That he knows that one kid found out something, maybe something about the murder, and Gorley got these others to … I don’t know, to do something to this kid.”
“Son of a bitch, Robert. What kind of a crime is this? What the hell am I dealing with?”
A knock at the door. Faruzi pushes it open.
“Brent? Robert? Hello?”
“Yeah, hiya Faruzi. Good to see ya. C’mon in.”
The Mayor doesn’t smile, doesn’t greet the detective. He is sure that this visit will end in his own arrest. It’s all over but the lying. Brent shakes the detective’s hand.
“What a day. My God. Well, listen. While I got you here, I wanna ask a couple questions. First, you workin’ on some conspiracy thing with Gorley and the kids over at Buddy Holly?”
“What? What? No. Where’d you hear that?”
“Mayor?”
The Mayor’s mind is clouding over through this exchange.
“Well … well, that’s what I thought he was saying.”
Brent sits down on the end of the couch and leans over to the Mayor. He taps his chin while he studies the man’s face.
“Robert, is there something you wanna tell us?”
Brent waves his hand at Faruzi without taking his eyes off Robert. Faruzi walks around the coffee table and into the Mayor’s bedroom. Now. Soon. I don’t have to say anything.
“Ah. Ah. I don’t know …”
The Mayor closes his eyes. He’s expecting the detective to return any second, gasping from his horrible discovery. He’s still in there.
“You don’t know? You don’t know? Robert, are you in some kind of trouble?”
Where is he? The Mayor turns quickly toward the open door.
“Never mind him, Robert. I think you need to talk about something. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Faruzi appears. He leans into the doorframe. He says nothing.
“Ah. I don’t have anything to say.”
Robert looks up to Faruzi. Pleading. Pale. His eyes are drying up. Faruzi looks back, frowning, then away. As if he had nothing, as if he saw nothing.
“Faruzi, you got anything you wanna ask the Mayor?”
Brent looks up at Faruzi. His mouth is opened strangely — held open. Faruzi squints out through the sliding window. His frown begins to tremble.
“Faruzi? You gonna help me here?”
Faruzi’s head snaps down and he coughs, holding his forehead.
“You alright?”
The Mayor hears a funny sound in Brent’s voice. Is he trying not to laugh? Robert looks up at Faruzi, who pulls his head out of his hand. There are tears in his eyes and he’s laughing.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Brent. I just can’t …”
Brent stands up and reaches to the back of his belt, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. The Mayor sits bolt upright.
“It’s OK. It’s OK. I couldn’t either. Not much longer, anyway.”
Brent pulls the Mayor’s arms behind his back and snaps the cuffs tight on his wrists. Faruzi has stepped back into the darkness of the bedroom. Robert bends his head back, straining his neck to see.
“Brent? Brent? What are you guys doing?”
Brent tears off a strip of duct tape and wraps it twice around the Mayor’s head. He forces Robert’s mouth open, pulling the tape tightly through his cheeks so that his tongue is flattened against the adhesive back of the tape. The Mayor hears Faruzi bang against the doorframe. He tosses the boy’s body onto the couch, then jumps on too, sitting across the back of the corpse’s legs. There is a black mound where the boy’s eye should be. There is pepper on his cheeks. Faruzi roughly lifts the boy’s neck, bending his body against its stiffness. Finally, with a hard yank that snaps the dense muscles from his hip, he sits him up.
“Little boy’s dead.”
Brent is standing behind the Mayor.
“That’s OK.”
Faruzi, who is using considerable force to keep the body bowed upright, hooks his finger through the eye socket, dislodging the black cap of dried gel.
“Sure it’s OK.”
Faruzi shakes his hand and causes the entire upper body to bounce.
“I think it’s more than OK.”
Brent lays a hand on the Mayor’s shoulder.
“He’s feelin’ no pain.”
Suddenly, there’s the sound of a child screaming on the porch. Brent hauls the Mayor up to his feet and shoves him down the hall. Robert falls and Faruzi steps over him to open the door.
“Visitors!”
A woman in a grey sweatshirt that says “Will Work for Beer” is pulling her shrieking daughter by the arm. She flips her free hand at Faruzi.
“Don’t panic! Don’t panic! Here!”
Brent hands Faruzi his gun and he slaps it in the woman’s hand. She points it at the back of her daughter’s head and fires, sending the little girl down into the shrubs off the side of the porch. She laughs quickly and loudly, then turns to Faruzi and sighs.
“Ah. There she goes. Thank you, officer.”
Faruzi grabs the gun and hands it back to Brent.
“No problem. You gonna miss her?”
The woman smiles and takes a quick breath. She looks down at her daughter’s feet sticking out of the shrubbery.
“Sure I am.”
Brent steps past Faruzi and puts his arm around her.
“OK, then. Off you go!”
He fires the gun into her side and she falls back off the porch. The wound is not instantly fatal and she draws up her shirt to reveal a small hole. It pumps thick, fresh blood. She looks up, momentarily confused, then bunches the skin around the hole in her fist. Brent levels the gun at her head.
“Open wide!”
She sticks out her tongue as far as she can and closes her eyes. Brent fires again and the bullet shatters her upper teeth.
“You coming?”
Faruzi pulls out the gun that’s tucked down the back of his pants.
“Nope.”
He puts the gun in his mouth and fires, blowing the back of his head off into a wide fan of pink steam.
“OK, suit yourself.”
THIRTEEN
A police cruiser reaches an intersection that had been the scene of senseless murder just a day and a half earlier. A man lays on his side in front of Bletcher’s Video. He is dead. Brent fires into the body, and it shifts. A man steps out of the store and looks down at the corpse. Brent waves his gun at the man.
“You do that?”
Brent notices the man’s face is covered with deep slits. Dark patches of blood, like leopard spots, dot his shirt. A woman with a long filleting knife steps out beside him.
“Oh. That’s good!”
Brent fires his gun, sending a bullet deep into the man’s chest. The woman bends over the fallen man and stabs furiously into his throat. Brent laughs.
“OK, Gertie, you make sure he’s dead, now. You never can tell.”
Brent squeals his tires.
“Jesus, what a fuckin’ loon.”
He drives the car up and around the corner at the top of Main Street. A child pulls a wagon, having some difficulty with its weight. The officer slows and stops beside the boy. There are seven heads wedged like bloody melons in the wagon.
“What you got there, son?”
The boy looks up and sneezes, jumping clear off the sidewalk. He points at his cargo, then lays a hand on the first head.
“Uh, this is Mommy, Daddy, and my Grampa. And that’s Pauly. But I don’t know who the rest of ’em are.”
“Don’t know, huh?”
The boy shrugs.
“They’re staying at our house for the weekend.”
“So they’re with you?”
“Yup.”
Brent levels his gun at the boy.
“Need a hand?”
The boy looks at the barrel of the gun and bends over to pick up his wagon’s red steel handle.
“Nope.”
Brent pulls the gun back.
“OK.”
The boy attempts to pull his cargo up the hill but is obviously struggling. Brent steps out of the car. “Here, I can take a couple.”
He grabs two heads by the hair and swings them into the trunk. They tumble off the Mayor’s lap.
As he returns to the driver’s seat he runs his hand across the boy’s head.
“I’ll see you later son.”
The officer drives up the hill and out onto a flat field behind the church. There are dozens of tables set up in a circle on the grass. They’re surrounded by hundreds of milling people. A light applause goes up around the cruiser as it drives between two tables and parks.
The Mayor notices that some parts of the field are unlike others. The fair itself is familiar enough, and it seems at a glance to be the same as it ever was. Except for the little moments of extreme violence that catch his eye, the little eddies of activity. Localized, the events take place as exceptions, rather than the rule. Not everyone sees them, but they do occur.
From where he’s sitting, Robert can see a sign painted in thick brushstrokes: “Original Carvings.” A large bald man in a white undershirt is seated in a chair beside the sign. His head is thrown back and a woman at his side is talking to a gathering of children seated in a semi-circle on the lawn.
“OK kids, you can just use stuff you find around the house for this.”
She lifts a cookie cutter from the table.
“Now, hold still.”
She presses the silver star shape into the man’s cheek and then pulls it away. She has left a light pink impression.
“Hmmm. Well that doesn’t do it. OK. Let’s see what else we have, shall we?”
She pulls up an apple corer.
“This is better. OK, first thing you should look for is areas that you can start on easily. Check the soft spots: they usually can get you right inside without too much fuss.”
She presses her finger into the man’s eye causing him to jump forward. He puts his hand up to his eye and speaks with a deep voice.
“Whoa! Jesus. OK. Sorry. OK. I’m OK now.”
He pulls his hand away and blinks his eyes clear, opening the lids with his fingers.
The woman holds the apple corer against his cheek and lays a hand on his shoulder.
“Everything alright?”
He smiles up to her and throws his head back.
“Sure, that’s better. Go ahead.”
The woman points the corer at his face, her elbow is raised up over the children’s heads.
“OK, then you just get started. Dig right in.”
She drives the corer into his eye, which slips under its point. Membranes pop as the corer scores the top of the socket and pierces deep into the man’s brain. His legs kick out and his shoulders heave up under her pushing hand.
“Now, you’re in. You just wait a bit, sometimes a few minutes.”
The man stops moving and a long rope of blood flies out of his nostril.
“OK. That should do it. There’s always lots of blood, so have a nice clean damp rag handy.”
A child seated near her tosses a white tea towel off the lawn. She wipes blood from his cheeks.
“This is Mr. French, by the way. He’s my hubby.”
She looks up from her work. Her lower lip is trembling. She wipes a tear from her cheek with the back of her blood-splattered forearm.
“Oh, dear, I’m getting a little teary. He was my husband, you know. He’s not even been dead a minute.”
She raises her elbow again, preparing to jab her tool into his other eye. She stops and brings her hands against his head, holding it up by the cheeks.
“I love you, Mr. French.”
She kisses her husband and pulls her head back. She speaks without turning to the children.
“Oh dear. I don’t feel so good, children. I don’t know if I should have done that.”
The woman steps back from the chair, still facing away from the kids.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can do this right now. Did you get the idea though? Maybe I shouldn’t have had Mr. French help me today. Oh dear, I’ve made a mess of this haven’t I? Why don’t I show you some of the finished ones I brought, OK?”
Two of the children get up. The Mayor watches them leave. The woman hangs the apple corer through the strap of her dead husband’s undershirt. She drags a large bushel, covered by a checkered tablecloth, out from under the table.
Suddenly the cruiser starts up again and lurches forward. The Mayor cannot see the woman anymore, and a different table comes into view. An array of candles has been arranged. For the most part they are squat and heavy. Deep colours: burgundy, black, cobalt blue. A string is slung across the back between two upright posts. On this string, several paired beeswax candles dry; they are pale, nearly translucent. They’re textured in a tight, diamonded honeycomb pattern. A young boy in a baseball cap is seated beside the table. He appears bored. The Mayor moves to attract his attention, wiggling his shoulders and kicking his feet against the heads that lay heavily on his legs. The boy looks up.
“What?”
The Mayor makes a noise, a whine that vibrates the tape on his lips. He bites down and the gag digs painfully into the back of his neck.
“What?”
Robert’s whining goes higher and he blows a clear wet tube of mucous out of a nostril. The boy makes a disgusted face and puts his hands to his lips to create a megaphone.
“Mom
my!”
The Mayor’s heart pounds in the flesh along his gag, banging and knocking through his neck. Not your mother. Not your mother. He shakes his head furiously, causing a piece of the tape to separate. He stops, surprised by the relief of pressure. A tall woman in an apron decorated with bright blue pans with pink handles steps up to her son.
“What are you yelling about?”
The kid rolls his eyes and lowers his head, sulkily. He points at the Mayor.
“Something’s wrong with him.”
The woman looks at the Mayor, then turns quickly back to her son.
“There’s nothing wrong with him. Why don’t you mind your own business?”
She slaps the boy hard. He covers his red cheek with a hand and whimpers.
“Do you want me to get your father? Is that what you want?”
“No.”
The woman turns and steps toward the trunk.
“Gil! Gil!”
She mutters under her breath, and only the Mayor can hear her.
“Now, you got a real problem, sonny Jim.”
The Mayor pushes at the tape with his tongue, but it’s only slightly looser. He feels a sharp knitting pain in the muscle and it causes him to bark. The woman looks down at him.
The cruiser pulls forward and the scene is dragged to the Mayor’s left just as the axe rises again. They’re moving some distance this time, going a little faster, bouncing in ruts, causing the heads in the trunk to bump and roll against each other. When the car stops, Robert can see several tables at a distance. People are gathered again, but he cannot tell what they’re doing. The Mayor hears a car door slam. He is aware that different rules seem to govern different parts of the field. He wishes he could move. There must be a place near here where none of this is happening.
Brent appears in front of him and crouches.
“Now, if I remove that tape, are you gonna be good?”
Robert nods furiously.
“OK. I’m gonna take it off. But I don’t want you to say anything to upset these folks, OK?”
The Mayor leans his head forward and groans.
“Alright.”
Brent reaches around the back of the Mayor’s head and rips the end of the tape off.
“This stuff is great!”
Brent pulls the unravelling tape in a snap across the front of the Mayor’s face.