The Fever Kill

by Tom Piccirilli

  He had just put the last bag in the trunk of the 'Stang when he glanced up the street and the heat began to crawl across the back of his neck.

  A bulky guy a little too dark for Hangtree was walking towards him with his hands in his coat pockets. It threw off his swaggering walk a little. His eyes were focused down and to the left, so that Crease was in his peripheral vision the entire time. The guy only looked up when he was about ten feet away. He smiled in what was supposed to be a disarming fashion, but it gave him a kind of animal leer.

  This one was the first wave of muscle. This one wasn't supposed to survive. Tucco was sending him in just to get an idea of what Crease was capable of. To see if he'd relaxed any. Tucco and Cruez would be waiting at the other end of town, near the highway, where they could bolt if they had to make a run.

  Crease reached under the dash to the magnetic drop box where he kept his .38 hidden. He plucked it free just as the guy came up very close, crossing the line of personal space. Muscle liked to get in close. They felt comfortable there, thinking they were so imposing that everybody else would just freeze in fear.

  "Excuse me, buddy, but you—"

  There was some foot traffic around so Crease had to be fast. He brought the butt of his gun up against the guy's forehead twice. It staggered the thug enough to make him completely pliant but didn't knock him out. His hand came free from his coat and a butterfly knife rolled down the length of his fingers and clattered on the street.

  Tucco and the butterfly knives, always with the knives.

  They looked cool but took too long to get out, all that whirling and snapping, and they were messy as hell to put away after being used. Crease picked the blade up quickly, pulled the guy by the elbow around to the passenger side of the 'Stang and stuffed him inside.

  The thug had one wide hand clasped over his head wound and blood was seeping out from beneath it. Crease said, "Don't bleed on the seat."

  Nobody on the street had seen anything. Crease got in the 'Stang and drove in the opposite direction of Reb's, back up to the highway. Tucco and Cruez would be around, pulled off on the side, maybe drinking tequila and listening to something with a good salsa beat. They'd look up and see Crease drive by and start laughing, give him a chase before dragging ass back to whichever motel they were holed up in. Morena would be in the back seat taking it all in, making plans of her own.

  Crease hit the highway and didn't even bother to check the rearview. He opened it up and within half a minute hit triple digits.

  This was a no man's land of road. Edwards and the county cops wouldn't patrol it because it was supposed to be covered by the state troopers. It wasn't worth their time trying to take bribes on the border of their jurisdiction. The troopers didn't care much about a stretch with no other major town around and hardly anyone coming through anyway. Even tourist season didn't bring in much traffic. Nobody wanted to circuit boonie turf.

  Crease floored it nearly all the way back to the diner where he'd first seen Reb again, until the interstate connection came up and the trucker traffic got thick again.

  The thug still had one hand pressed tightly over the wound. Blood dribbled down his face and collected in his collar. Crease found a rag under his seat and gave it to him. "Here, staunch the flow with this. What's your name?"

  "You gonna kill me?"

  "You want me to?"

  "No."

  Crease pulled into the diner parking lot and backed in far from the nearest car. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up, sitting there smoking while the guy watched him, trying to act like stone but the terror flitting across his face in ripples. "What's your name?"

  "Cholo."

  Cholo. A Spanish word that had come to mean a tough guy, a cowboy. Every third guy coming up from south of the border was called Cholo, and none of them seemed to get the hint that maybe the word was wearing itself out.

  "I've never seen you before. Where'd Tucco outsource you from?"

  "I run with Jinga's boys, sometimes."

  "I'm going to let you off here. Tucco will be along any minute, but keep out of sight."

  "Why?"

  Asking the question without taking the time to try to piece it together. This one wasn't going to last long.

  "Because he'll kill you," Crease said. "Puts the blame on me and he gets to have a little extra fun. He's probably bored and pissed off, him and Cruez taking this long drive up here. Puts him out of sorts."

  "They say he's crazy."

  "They're right."

  "They say you're crazy too."

  "They're pretty smart, whoever's giving you all this good information."

  Cholo shifted in his seat, looked over at the diner. Never even questioning if what Crease was telling him was the truth. Never thinking Crease might pull the gun again and put one behind his ear the minute he looked away. It was pretty clear why Jinga was such a small-timer, using dummies like this.

  "What do I do here?" Cholo asked.

  "Nobody in this part of Vermont is going to give you a ride unless you pay for it. A couple hundred bucks and you should be able to make your way back to New York with one of the truckers. Go back to Jinga and pretend this never happened."

  "I don't have a couple hundred bucks," Cholo said, sounding embarrassed.

  Crease stared at him for a while, thinking this situation was just getting goofier by the minute. "How much was Tucco paying you to take me out?"

  "Twenty g's. But only after I did it."

  "Way too much money to just ice a guy. Tucco never meant to pay you no matter how it turned out. You always get at least half the cash up front, that's how you know somebody's serious. You get it a couple days in advance so you can spread the word that you got something going on. Then, if anything happens to you, your boys know who to go see."

  Cholo's face firmed up and his eyes darkened with understanding. "I never thought of that."

  "You might want to try another profession, maybe go back to business school or something." Crease went into his pocket, pulled out two hundred bucks in fifties and stuck them in Cholo's hand, the one that wasn't covered with blood.

  Chapter Five

  He got back to Hangtree, found a pay phone, and called Mimi. She answered on the tenth ring and shrieked, "What!"

  "It's me," Crease said.

  "Why is it you call here and never your own house?"

  "You know why."

  "I know you shouldn't be afraid of your own wife and son. Is that how you go through your day, worried that you might have to talk to your wife and kid?"

  "Ex-wife."

  "Only because it's the way you wanted it. And Stevie'snot your ex-son, in case you're confused about that."

  The kids were yelling in the background and Mimi turned away from the phone to scream.

  "How is she?" Crease asked. "How's Joan?"

  "Doing her best. Stevie got in trouble at school again. Fighting. He's a bully. He storms around the lunchroom and terrorizes the other kids, even ones who are two, three grades ahead of him. The principal wants to speak to you. He says Stevie would benefit from a father's direct influence. You know what that means? He's talking about the belt. A kid like that, eight years old and punching other kids in the face, he needs a good belting." A dog started to bark. Crease didn't know Mimi had a dog. It sounded small and yippy, the kind that made neighbors go berserk and kill whole families. "I'd like you to talk to Joseph too, when you come around again, if you come around again. He could use a little guidance, a firm lecture. He doesn't listen to me."

  "Who?"

  "Who what?"

  "Who's Joseph? The dog?"

  "Joseph, my oldest!" she yelled. "You don't remember? Thirteen, he's got sandy hair, beady eyes. The dog's name is Freddy." Another voice rose, shouting that his eyes weren't beady, they were smoky. Girls at school called them smoky. Mimi shouted back, "Use condoms, always use condoms. They teach you that in sex education yet?"

  Crease remembered a beady-eyed little kid, but Christ, now Joey
was thirteen, being called Joseph, getting sweet-talked by schoolgirls. Crease shook his head, knowing his old life was further away than maybe it had ever been before.

  "She misses you," Mimi said. "I don't know what's been going on with you these last couple of years, or why you're calling me so much, but if it means you're going through a mid-life crisis, then I hope you get over it soon and get the hell back on track. You know what I'm saying?"

  He was twenty-seven. If this was a mid-life crisis it didn't say much for his longevity. Still fifty-four was longer than his own father had made it.

  "You listening to me, Crease?"

  "Yes."

  "You've done better by me than my sister. I appreciate it and . . . shut up in there! I appreciate it, but you need to think of Joan now. Call her. Deal with your son too. He's only got one father no matter what happens."

  Mimi hung up before Crease could say anything else. He stood there with the phone buzzing in his ear, a couple kids riding by on bicycles, a young couple pushing a baby girl in a stroller. If this was any other town, he might think this was a nice place to live.

  He looked in the trunk. The steaks were still frozen. He gunned it to Reb's place.

  ~ * ~

  Not much got to him, but he had to admit, watching Reb burn the hell out of the sirloins really started taking its toll. He sat there at her kitchen table, drinking wine, occasionally taking a forkful of salad, but the smoke was making his nose itch. Reb didn't seem to notice the gray haze rising up from the pan while the grease spattered all over. He craned his neck to look into the kitchen.

  She flipped the steaks and flipped them again, with the flame up way too high and the meat turning black. He wondered where her head was at, what it is that she was seeing, because she just wasn't picking up on the fact that in about ten more seconds they were going to be eating cereal for dinner instead.

  She glanced at him and saw his face and immediately forked the sirloins into two plates. There were some chopped up carrots on the plates alongside potatoes that she'd baked until they were shrunken and wrinkled. It no longer surprised him that she was so skinny.

  She put his food in front of him and handed him butter and salt like she knew he was going to need a lot of it to kill the taste. She smiled at him in a pleasant, Isn't this a nice way to spend the evening kind of way.

  She didn't know how it was done. Joan used to give him the real thing, every night, the perfect homemaker, loving and kind, sweeter with him than he deserved, but somebody he always had to put a front on for. She loved him through all his cynical silence and blamed only herself when he asked for a divorce. It showed him just how off the mark he'd gone. Any other man would be thankful to have a wife like that.

  "You aren't eating," Reb said. "Too well-done for you?"

  "No," he said, and started cutting into the charred meat.

  She sipped her wine and stepped over to the sideboard, got out two candlesticks, placed them on the table, and lit the candles. She sat and began eating and he couldn't figure out why she was trying to get at him this way, acting the part of a lover, attempting to be a spouse, doing things to make her man cozy. He knew he hadn't given her that impression.

  "You're going to go to the Burkes' house next, aren't you?" she asked.

  "Soon."

  "You remember those people?"

  "Yes," he said. He'd never spoken to Mary's parents, but he knew their faces. They'd stare at him in town and he'd stare back, his father's iniquity marking him. He knew that no matter how he approached them or what he said, it was bound to be an awful scene. But he couldn't see any way around it.

  "You'll never find out what happened," Reb told him. His own thoughts tossed back at him. "Digging it up now will only cause more trouble."

  "Maybe not," he said. Suddenly the burned steak didn't taste so bad anymore. It had no taste at all. He finished the meal very quickly and opened a second bottle of wine. It was old cheap stuff, the kind somebody who doesn't really like you gives you for a present over the holidays. It didn't make a difference.

  He felt like he was on a stage, being watched by an audience interested in farce, all of them out in the darkness waiting for him to say something funny, to snap off a well-written piece of dialogue.

  This was parody. This was burlesque.

  "What happens if you find the money?" she asked. "What do you mean?"

  "Who gets it? Who are you supposed to turn it in to? Do the Burkes get it again? I mean, can they prove it's theirs? If you just find a stash?"

  He tried to picture Reb laid back across the leather sofa in Tucco's penthouse, with the coke and H spread out on the glass-top table, the wads of cash stacked all over the place. Guys heating spoons and hitting the spike side by side on the U-shaped sectional, watching the Jets on the HD plasma. If she was ever dropped into the middle of that kind of life she'd be dead inside of three months.

  Truth was, he didn't know what would happen to the money. If he turned it in, Edwards would probably march off with it. He looked at Reb and saw her mind twirling with the wanting of the fifteen grand. The pulse in her throat was pounding so hard he thought it might break the thin, silver necklace she wore tonight. He wondered what it might be like to care that much about money. About anything.

  "I don't know," he said.

  That got her dreaming up more ideas. The fire was growing within her. He didn't have the heart to tell her that fifteen k just isn't that much. Why didn't she already know that?

  He sat there holding the glass of wine, sipping it and trying to figure what her next move would be. She was already trying to show him that she knew him better than anybody else, that she was inside his head, dirty and sharp as he was. That they were two of a kind.

  Maybe it didn't have everything to do with the lost ransom. Maybe she had something else brewing. He tried to picture what it might be, and saw her unfolding a piece of paper across the dining room table and showing him little x's on a map of the town bank. Telling him, Here's the manager's desk, and here's where the head teller does her transactions ... only one security guard, an old guy named Edgar...

  Reb looked at him and said, "What?"

  "Nothing."

  "You thinking about your son?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "You make time for him?"

  "Not enough," Crease admitted.

  Reb stood, sort of pirouetted around him. She took his hand and led him across the room to the couch. She pressed him down and lay stretched out, half in his lap, her hair strewn across his legs.

  "You never loved your wife," she said. "It's pretty clear to me."

  "I loved her as well as I could. As I can."

  "It's not enough though."

  "It is for her, but it shouldn't be. I couldn't do it to her any longer."

  "You knew it was going to be like that even when you married her, didn't you?"

  "No," he told her. He'd had no idea that the distance between him and Joan would be so great. The distance between him and anyone else, everyone else, except maybe Tucco.

  "You think you became a different person along the way?"

  He'd thought about that a lot. "No, but you don't know what your strengths and weaknesses are until you're forced to find out."

  He could see she wanted to ask him, And what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? But she was too smart to come right out with it. She wanted to take the time to maneuver things properly. It was fun watching her try to work him.

  He knew that as soon as she figured out she wasn't going to get anything from him, she'd toss him out of the house. Maybe even call Edwards and try to incite the sheriff to bust him. Or go back to Jimmy or somebody just like Jimmy and hope to spur him on to take a shot at Crease. You never knew what the next dilemma was going to be or where it was going to come from.

  "Now do you want to go to bed?" she asked.

  Crease let out a grin. It was starting to feel like New York around here.

  Chapter Six

&nb
sp; Wildlife had overtaken the old mill. The log ramps and tramcar flatbeds where the rough-cut lumber used to be loaded were covered over by tall grass, weeds, and saplings. He walked around the mill. There were broken floorboards everywhere. The roof had collapsed from heavy winter snows over the last four decades, and the rotted timbers lay crossing each other in heaps. Daylight shined in, and there were animal nests and signs of teenage vandalism everywhere.

  Crease tried to piece together the events of that night, the way his father had laid them out. Old rusted steam-powered saws and other machinery still lay about in the long, wide main room.

  His father would have been behind one of the trimmers, where the carriages worked back and forth ripping through the grain. There was a man-sized open area between two of them where a man could stretch out. From there he would be able to see the front door, down the length of the factory floor, and also keep his back mostly protected.

  Crease looked around and found where his father most likely hid the cash. Probably inside the rusted metal spoked wheels where the cut slabs were placed on flatbeds reeled down the slope by cables out the back of the mill. It was an incline system, typical of the way things were done in the '30s and '40s. The wheels were overhead but close enough.

  Crease had seen fifteen grand in tens and twenties before. It didn't look like much. A couple of stacks a few inches high. He acted out taking the bundles of cash from the satchel and placing the money beneath the flatbed.

  The mill was a good spot for the kidnappers to make the trade. No way for an ambush to work. Plenty of exits. Line of sight was fifty yards to the tree line in any direction. There were logging trails all up and down the hills. They could shake anybody chasing them.

  If his father had seen Edwards in the tree line, then the kidnappers would've seen him too. Edwards had botched any chance of a straight switch.

  Crease took up the position for a long wait, glancing about every so often across the width of the factory. Checking behind him, filling his head with his father's thoughts. He tried to imagine that fifteen thousand would be worth everything in the world, paying off the damn doctors. It would settle bad debts, allow for some breathing room with the mortgage company. What else? Not even a new car. A nicer secondhand model maybe. A couple rounds of drinks at the bar. Crease just couldn't understand it.