The three of us climbed the sleepy porch steps, picking up a whiff of something that smelled like old sardines. No answer when we rang, then knocked.
The shades were all down except one—the window by the door. We looked inside the living room. Worn and musty-like. The wallpaper had faded in spots from bright yellow to almost white. It was the kind of place where you’d expect to see five or six cats lounging about, though none were on hand.
Next door, a stout, elderly, shovel-jawed woman was watering the plants in her front yard. We looked at her. She looked at us.
“Clammy day, isn’t it?” she yelled over at us. “Pretty close for this time of year.”
“Too sweaty out for me,” said Wooly.
“Especially for this time of season. What this is, to me, this is more like July weather.”
“Or August.”
She nodded. “August, yes. August.”
We walked to the edge of her yard. She gave Wooly a good look-see.
“What brings you to our street, Mr. Cornell?”
“You know who I am?”
“Who could live in this town and not know you?”
He laughed—though the complimentary intentions of her remark were open to interpretation.
“We were wondering,” he said, “if Roy Freeny—“
“I’m Mrs. Wilkinson.”
“Pleasure.”
“If I know your name, you should know mine.”
“Well put.”
“The way things should be.”
“Would you happen to know if—“
“I think he might’ve gone into town. At least I saw him driving that way. My guess would be into town.”
“Roy Freeny.”
“Who else?”
“Into town?”
“That would be my guess.”
“What was he driving? Said Nickie. “Was it a Ford Fusion?”
Mrs. Wilkinson glanced at Nickie and narrowed her eyes. Not necessarily with suspicion, more like she was trying to place her.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I can’t keep up with all these makes and models. They all look the same to me.”
“Do you know the color? Was it green?”
“Blue.”
“Blue?”
“Blue.”
“You’re sure?”
Mrs. Wilkinson snapped the words at her. “I do know my colors.”
“Known Roy a long time?” I said.
“Oh, years. Years and years.” A smile came back to the woman’s face. “All his life, I guess.”
“Good neighbor?”
“Very nice, very sweet. A little distracted at times by all his causes and whatnot, but really a very considerate man. You know he lost his mother a few years ago, six or seven years ago. But he still sends out Christmas cards with both their names signed. I think that’s so touching.”
“It’s very interesting,” said Nickie.
“But what an awful neighbor I am. I shouldn’t be talking about him like this.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Nickie was looking down Roy’s driveway. There was a single-car garage at the end, more accurately described as a shack with a padlocked door.
“Does he have another car?” she asked.
“He does, but don’t ask me its name or serial number. I just don’t know.”
“Is it green?”
“That one is, yes, though I don’t think it works very well. He hardly takes it out at all.”
Quick glances between the three of us.
“So you think he went into town,” said Wooly. “Would you have any idea where?”
She would. Possibly Sherrard’s Groceries or Allende’s Market, depending on the sales. Or Hidden Lake Deli, to buy his lottery. Wings ‘N Things, he likes a late breakfast. The Keypad, he likes his computers. Hidden Lake Library. Hidden Lake Hardware. Hidden Lake Health Food. Hidden Lake Pharmacy.
We thanked Mrs. Wilkinson for her help—at least Wooly and I did—as she shut her hose off. Once she was back in her house, our trio headed down Roy’s driveway. Wooly looked the Freeny house over as we passed.
“Wonder which room it was,” he said.
“With the closet?”
“Yeah.”
The garage was a seriously warped and buckled affair. It looked as if it had tried to reach around at one point and scratch itself on the back. We found a window at the rear and pressed our faces against the dirt-snowed glass. A green Ford Fusion was inside, splotched with mud. No license plate.
Roy, Roy, he’s our boy.
I thought about something else Mrs. Wilkinson had said. He likes his computers.
“Do me a favor, call the shop where your car is. See if they can find anything under the bumpers.”
“Like what?” said Wooly.
“Like a GPS transmitter.”
Two minutes later we had an answer.
“Sweet fucking Caesar,” said Wooly. “Son of a bitch had me bugged.”
>>>>>>
TUESDAY JUNE 19, 11:25 a.m.
BLOOD WILL RUN ACROSS THE EARTH
The air in town was turning blue with high temperature. It was like the day had more light than the sky could hold. We tried the Hidden Lake Deli first. The guy behind the counter, big man with a bushy beard, said he hadn’t seen Roy Freeny. The shaved head? The tattoo? Not today. We looked in Sherrard’s Groceries and Allende’s Market. No Roy.
Wooly wanted to try Wings ‘N Things next—mostly he wanted something to eat. Fine, but we still had plenty of places to check. I suggested we split up for a few minutes. I was interested in The Keypad. Nickie took Wooly to the restaurant.
The Keypad was a few blocks away. A bell hanging on the door announced my entrance, took me into a small store filled with laptops, peripherals and the occasional desktop. And a slight damp smell, mixing in with the air conditioning. A quarter of the ceiling was brown-stained with water damage.
A wiry guy, all veins and tendons, had his elbows propped up on the particle-board counter. Shelly Ramos, according to his nametag. Looking at him made you think of a piece of cable with its insulation stripped away.
I asked if he sold GPS transmitters. He sighed deeply. An Altoids breeze blew across the counter.
“I can. I can get them.”
“You sold one to a friend of mine, guy I know. Roy Freeny?”
“Right, yeah. Roy Freeny.”
“You know him, right?”
“Right.”
“He been around lately?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah? Not today? He wasn’t in today?”
“No.”
“I thought I saw him around. I thought I saw him around here before.”
Shelly gave me a gaze-on stare. “You’re a very inquisitive person.”
“Just being careful.”
“Why’re you asking questions about a customer?”
“Is that off limits?”
“When it comes to customer confidentiality, yeah.”
“But you know him, right? You know Roy Freeny. I just want to make sure.”
“What’s to know? He’s just an ordinary guy. About as engrossing as anybody else. Nothing exciting about him. Probably goes home and watches his phone charge. There’s nothing to know.”
“There you’re wrong. He’s got a very interesting background.”
“Yeah well that’s interesting, but all I do is sell computers. All models, all the name brands.”
“You know about his brother? Kid killed himself?”
“I sell storage drives, memory upgrades, presentation projectors.”
“You know about him and Wooly Cornell?”
“I offer a full range of product—digital cameras, music players, any named thing you want.”
The bell in the front sounded. Shelly glanced at the door, then immediately looked down at the counter.
“So what kind of GPS transmitter you looking for?” he said in a
loud, Altoids-rich voice.
A moment of total silence. It was like a vacuum jar had dropped over the store.
I turned. A guy with a hoodie was standing at the open door. He had the hood up, odd considering the day’s heat. His face was shadowed, but I could see the outlines of a bare skull, and I could see enough of his features to match the man I’d watched in the conference room at the village hall.
Roy stood there, taking the situation in, absorbing it for 0.4 seconds, then bolted the hell out.
I’m not saying Roy wasn’t fast. He probably had some decent speed. Thing is, he had to turn around to run. I didn’t. I had the momentum. By the time I got out of the store, he was only 12 feet ahead of me and already losing ground. Shoppers scuttled out of the way as our feet slapped hot pavement.
Roy got desperate, made a sudden jerk out into the street. But traffic was heavy and a speeding Nissan Sentra forced him to hold up. I ran at him full on and caught him on the side with all my weight, body slamming him over the hood of a parked car.
He came up thrashing. His arms were flailing so madly he knocked his own hood off and exposed that tattooed skull. He was trying to regain his footing and ward me off with all that whirlwind motion. Not a good defense. I hit him in the face so hard his cheek was already turning dark with blood rush when he staggered back on the sidewalk.
I stepped into him. This time he lurched at me with a bent-low charge, arms clawing for mine, trying to tackle me. I body checked him and clocked him with an uppercut that brought strings of snotty blood streaming out of his nose. He fell back against the window of a barbecue joint and made a slow slide to a sitting position on the ground.
He seemed fully cooked. I called Nickie. “I’ve got him.”
Where are you?
“By The Keypad, about a block away.” I looked at street signs. “The corner of—“
Roy’s foot caught me square in the chest. It had roughly the same effect, I would guess, of being hit by a sledge hammer. Next thing I knew I was flat on the sidewalk, looking up at the sky and trying hard to breathe.
What happened next—people always say things like this happen in slow motion, but that’s only in memory. When shit like this happens, it happens fast. I saw Roy back off and reach inside his hoodie. I rolled over and started to get to my feet. A second later it felt like a tiny little jet was flying just over my head. I heard a noise and felt an incredibly miniaturized aircraft making a pass through the air space around my head. Then another one followed the same route. I looked at Roy and all of a sudden the fucker’s standing there with a gun in his hand.
The next shot ricocheted off a parking sign right behind me. The thin metal was still twanging when I left the sidewalk and dove in front of a parked car, ducking down just as the car’s back window ripped apart in a sunburst pattern.
The street went hysterical. People were scattering like Tupperware in a hurricane while Roy kept firing. A store window on the other side of the road suddenly exploded, its alarm going off as a million bits of glass rained on the pavement.
Roy broke off for a moment. I pulled the Glock and pointed it over the fender. No way was I going to squeeze rounds with all these people around, but he didn’t know that. He jumped behind another parked car, then shifted over to the street side and began firing at me like he was in some fever delirium. He was thumping bullets into the body of the car and tearing up pieces of cement from the road and just about shattering the molecular structure of the air over my head. I crouched down so low I was tasting pavement.
Traffic stopped for a red light and horns began to honk. No more shots now, just horns and the store alarm. I looked up. Roy was sprinting between hoods and trunk, his gun still out. Yeah, he had some speed. He was already a block away and nearing the other side of the street. He was getting away. And people were honking at him as he ran past. Blowing your horn at a maniac with a gun—that’s balls.
>>>>>>
I saw him take a corner. Seconds later, time I got there, he was gone. But Nickie was running down the street from the opposite direction, Wooly jogging far behind. Nickie turned down an alley in the middle of the block.
It was a long alley, fenced off at the end. When I got there Roy was trying to climb the chain links, but he was having trouble. His shoes were too big to get a foothold in the diagonal squares. Sometimes size matters against you.
He slipped off once and was pulling himself up for another go at it when Nickie ran up to him and rammed the butt of her Smith & Wesson in the small of his back. He screamed, lost his hold and down he went, his gun clattering to the ground.
“Put your hands on the fence!” Nickie yelled at the hunched over man. “Hands on the fence!”
Roy grabbed the chain links with his left hand and started hoisting himself to his feet. Halfway up he whirled around and swung his other arm at Nickie. The hunting knife sliced across the surface of her thigh.
I was on them by then. I pointed the Glock at his face. “Put it down, Roy!”
He never got the chance. Nickie smashed him in the head with her gun. Hit him once, twice. Even after the knife fell she pistol whipped him two more times.
I pulled her off. “Enough!”
Roy had his hands over his bloody head, trying to protect himself.
“Enough!”
“It’s okay,” said Nickie. “I’ve got him. I’ve got him.”
Sirens were filling the streets behind us.
Wooly was standing 20 feet away. He looked totally glazed.
I walked over. “Don’t worry, everything’s all right.”
“Look at his head,” he said. “Look at his fucking head.”
Roy was on his knees, crying for help, and the blood was rushing down his scalp, funneling into his mouth, running over the tattoo of the globe on the side of his skull.
“The world will bleed,” Wooly said with sick confirmation. “The world will stream red. Blood will run across the earth.”
I felt dizzy, caught in a spell.
“Okay,” I said, “it’s just—“
“It’s no coincidence. Nothing like that. There’s no such thing as coincidence. I’m standing here, I’m watching myself die. You’re listening to me, you’re listening to the words of a dying man.”
What was weird was that he was so calm about it. His voice was hoarse but his tone was dull, almost bored. It was strange because Wooly was never one to pass up the chance for a big emotion.
“It’s just closer now, that’s all,” he said. “It’s just 48 hours away.”
>>>>>>
A crowd had gathered at the street end of the alley, nobody moving, like they were suspended in the air and their feet weren’t touching the ground. Roy was still lumped by the fence, Alex Tarkashian crouched in front of him. His head still drizzling blood, Roy stared at Alex with a gone-lost brood, and when he opened his mouth to talk the spaces between his teeth were all lined with red.
We stood apart from them, Nickie leaning against a wall, her pant leg soaked with blood. Ambulances were coming for both her and Roy.
“This sucks,” she said. “A fucking hunting knife. This big time sucks.”
She was staying completely still, less out of pain I think than conservation. It was as if she thought her anger would suddenly evaporate if she made any move at all.
Alex got up and walked over to us. “They’ll have to invent more letters in the alphabet to describe this shit.”
“What’s he saying?” said Wooly.
“He was out for you. He admits it. Three times he shot at you. He’s copping to all that.”
“Three times.”
“There you go. He says he knows nothing about the Grand Cherokee yesterday. Says he knows even less about any attack.”
“Right, he was off saying a novena at the time.”
“Be serious.”
Alex’s two cops lifted Roy up and began dragging him out of the alley. One of the cops tripped over his own feet but maintained his balance.
“A great town you’ve got going here,” said Wooly, “killers running loose through the streets.”
Roy, shuffling past us, took offense. “You’re calling me a killer? Me? What about you? They can’t even compute your death toll.”
“I’m sorry about your brother.”
“Not just my brother. It’s everybody. It’s all the people you’ve killed with that fucking factory. You’re the lead paint of the human race.”
The cops tried to move him along but Roy resisted, digging his feet in, blood drooling from his head and pooling on the ground.
“You’re still at it?” said Wooly. “You’re still pumping all that willy nilly shit?”
Roy made his case to Alex. “Nobody listens. Nobody understands about him. Nobody sees the madness of it all, and you know something? It just gets to you after a while.”
“I know,” said Alex. “Life would be easier without him, but you’ve got to learn to control yourself.”
“He stinks. He deserves reprisals. He should take a restraining order out on himself.”
Alex stepped closer to him. “I’ve known you a long time, Roy. I knew your mother. I’ll treat you with all fairness, I’ll read you your rights myself, but don’t fuck with me. Now move.”
But Roy wasn’t done. He looked at Nickie. “And what about her? She’s not a killer?”
Nickie turned away from him. “Shit,” she said softly.
“Lot of people still think what she did was murder.”
“All right,” said Alex, ”enough with this shit. Move.”
He and the other cops started shoving Roy toward the street.
“I keep thinking,” said Roy, “I’ll go to the doctor one day with some strange disease, and he’ll say have you ever been exposed to Nickie Castillo?”
“He has no right,” Nickie yelled, “to talk like that.”
Alex turned to her. “What do you expect him to say?”
They pushed Roy out of the alley. Nickie limped after them, silent, sullen.
I looked at Wooly. “What’re they talking about?”
“Fuck if I know.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 10