Dog Eat Dog

by Edward Bunker

  He turned off the light and watched.

  The car below pulled away. A taxi. Sheila and Melissa, her seven-year-old daughter named for a song, came into view at the bottom of the stairs. He could see Sheila’s white face as she looked up. Mad Dog froze, certain she could see nothing except a black window. She would think he was gone because his car wasn’t at the curb. It was in the service bay of the neighborhood Chevron station awaiting his payment for an alternator, but she didn’t know about that. Good enough. It would give him time to shoot the last of the cocaine before he had to listen to her nagging bullshit. Forgotten was the surge of affection he’d felt earlier. Instead he thought of how she bitched at him about cocaine, and everything else, too.

  Mad Dog heard them come in the front door and move around on the bottom floor. He could hear the child’s quick feet, then the back door opening and closing. She was feeding the cat, no doubt. She was a worthless little brat most of the time. She disliked him and refused to do what he said until he promised to beat her butt if she didn’t straighten up. When she complied, it was with a resolutely hangdog manner, pouting and dragging her feet. The only good thing about her was her love of the cat. She was always thoughtful and generous; she’d once used her last dollar for a can of cat food. Mad Dog had a grudging affection for such loyalty.

  When he heard the canned laughter on the TV downstairs, he turned on the nightstand lamp; it threw a yellow pool of light on the ritual paraphernalia of the needle. He squirted a small syringe of water directly into the jar; then put on the lid and shook it. That way he would lose nothing. He sucked it through the needle into the syringe. He held it up and squeezed very gently, until a drop appeared at the tip of the point. That meant the air was out of the syringe. He took his time fixing it, savoring it as long as possible. If he could only hold this sensation forever; that would be heaven indeed.

  Within minutes the joy was frayed at the edges by inchoate anguish, by self-pity. Why me, God? Why has life been so shitty from the very start? His earliest memory was from age four, when his mother had tried to drown him in the bathtub. His six-year-old sister, who later turned dyke and dope fiend whore, had saved his life by screaming and screaming until the neighbors came. They had stopped his mother and called the police, who had taken the children to juvenile hall, and the judge then sent his mother to Napa State Hospital for observation. Another time, the nurse at school had found the welts on his body where his mother had pinched him, digging in her thumb and forefinger and twisting his flesh. The pain had been awful, and afterward there was a bruise. Remembering it now, three decades later, gave him goose bumps.

  She’d gone to Napa twice after that, once for eight months, before she died when he was eleven. He was away from her by then—in reform school. The chaplain called him in to tell him; then looked at his watch and told the boy he could have twenty minutes alone in the office to express his grief. The moment the door closed after the chaplain stepped out, Mad Dog was on his feet reaching for the drawers. He was looking for cigarettes, the most valuable commodity in the reform school economy.

  Nothing in the drawers. He went to the closet. Bingo! In a jacket pocket he found a freshly opened pack of Lucky Strikes. L.S.M.F.T. No bullshit! He took them and felt good. He stuffed the pack into his sock and sat back down. That was where he was when the chaplain came back. He wanted to have a talk and he looked at the folder and frowned and said something about “… your father …”

  Mad Dog stood up and shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it. Indeed, he had nothing to say. He knew nothing of his father, not even his name. It wasn’t on his birth certificate. By now his sister, who did have a name on her birth certificate, was calling him “trick baby.” When he looked in the mirror, he was ugly and resembled nobody in the family. Although they were a nondescript bunch, they tended to be tall and pale with stringy hair, whereas he was short and swarthy, with curls so tight they neared being kinky. A loudmouth older boy had once even asked if his mama had a nigger in the woodpile. Ha ha ha. The bully was too big and too mean to challenge, but when the dormitory lights were out and the bully was snoring. Mad Dog crawled along the floor and beat his head soft with a Louisville slugger. The victim survived, but he was never the same; his speech was forever impaired, as was his brain. It was then that Gerry McCain had gotten the nickname “Mad Dog.” It was a nickname he had lived up to in the ensuing years.

  The last fix was wearing off; the headache was pulsing behind his eyes. Aspirin. Naw. Aspirin wouldn’t touch this one. Besides, the aspirin was downstairs and he wanted to avoid Sheila’s nagging ass as long as possible. Her shrill voice worked on his brain like fingernails on a blackboard. If he had some dough he would pack up and leave and wait for Troy in California, maybe even Sacramento. Things had cooled off by now. He even had a couple of scores in mind, but he hated doing anything alone and the only possible crime partner around was Diesel Carson. Mad Dog had known Diesel ever since reform school. They’d even taken a score together. That was the reason he wouldn’t do anything with Diesel until Troy resurrected.

  His headache was awful, and he could suddenly smell the stink of his own body. Booze and cocaine smelled terrible when you sweat them out. Cocaine was the worst drug. Terrible shit. He hated it. Yet he also craved another fix to postpone the hours of hell fast approaching. What he really needed was a fix of heroin. That was the perfect remedy for the gray scream of depression in his brain. The crash was starting. If he could only sleep through it …

  Then he remembered the Valiums. The big ones. Blues. The vial might have eight tablets left. That many would poleax him to sleep. He wouldn’t care about the night sweats and the terrible dreams. He went to the dresser and opened the drawer. Among ballpoint pens, empty butane cigarette lighters, Pepto-Bismol tablets, and other effluvia, he found the little brown vial. He pried off the cap and dumped the contents into his palm. Six! Six! The bitch had been in the bottle.

  Anger worsened the headache. He swallowed the six blue tablets with the help of a cold cup of coffee. He threw the empty vial into the wastebasket and started to lie down.

  That was when the door opened and the overhead light went on with one hundred watts of brightness. Sheila stood there, her eyes going saucer-wide at the sight of him. She let out a little cry of surprise and her fist went to her mouth.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What the fuck does it look like? Get outta here and leave me alone.” He looked at her and hated her moon face with the blemished skin. How could he have ever thought her pretty? It must have been because he was fresh from prison and a female crocodile would have looked good. “I told you never to come in here without knocking.”

  “I didn’t know you were home,” she said. “Your car’s not downstairs and you didn’t come down to say hello. Where is your car?”

  “It’s at the gas station getting fixed.”

  “Don’t talk to me with that tone of voice. I don’t like it.”

  “She doesn’t like it,” he mimicked with scorn. “Ain’t that a bitch.” He leaned forward, looming over her. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you like or don’t like—bitch!” The pounding blood in his brain made him dizzy. He might have backhanded her except for the child’s voice calling out, “Mommy! Mommy!” The sound of the girl’s footsteps preceded her appearance in the doorway. She went to her mother. When they both faced him they looked alike.

  “Let’s go downstairs, honey,” Sheila said, arm around the girl’s shoulder as she turned her and walked her out the door.

  “Can I watch Star Trek? It just started.”

  “Sure. If you go to bed right afterward. Go on.” She sent the child out and turned back to Mad Dog McCain. She had gotten herself under control. “You’ve got to leave. I don’t want you here anymore.”

  “Great. As soon as I get my wheels out of the gas station, I’m gone.”

  “Don’t even think about charging it on my card. In fact, gimme the card back.” S
he extended her hand and snapped her fingers.

  “Hey, if you want me to go … I gotta get the car out first.”

  “No. Give it here.”

  He saw she was unafraid. Why? Because she knew too much about the robbery of the merchant ship’s payroll. She’d worked in the offices of a shipping company, and told him that merchant seaman were still paid in cash at the end of a voyage. She’d told him what ship, when and where. He and Diesel Carson had ripped off eighty-four grand. Sheila knew everything, and even though she was a conspirator, the authorities would certainly drop charges if she testified against Diesel Carson and Mad Dog McCain, a pair of lifelong criminals. Yeah, the bitch thought she had him by the balls. Why the fuck had he trusted her?

  He took the Chevron card from his wallet and threw it at her. It fell on the floor. “Bastard,” she said, picking it up and going out, slamming the door as she did so.

  He blinked at the door while spinning down, down into the hell of a cocaine crash. Inside him was a silent scream of despair and a growing brute rage. Without the credit card he couldn’t retrieve his car, and without his car he could never make any money. He was stranded. He could become homeless. He had a .357 Python and an AK-47 with a thirty-round clip, enough firepower to heist almost anything—but he couldn’t run around on foot. He needed wheels, and not a carjacking. That was for young niggers who didn’t know how to steal anything worthwhile. Still, he needed wheels more than anyone in their right mind could imagine. It bordered on obsession, and maybe paranoia.

  Through the closed door, he heard Sheila and the child enter the next room. Melissa’s bedtime. The thin wall allowed enough sound for him to visualize what was going on. The brat was saying her prayers. Jesusfuckingchrist—he hated religion. He hated God. He loved evil more than good and lying more than speaking the truth. He decided that he was going to get the credit card right now.

  When he opened the bedroom door and peered out in the hall, the bedroom door to his right was ajar. They were in there. The stairs were to the left. He was careful to make no noise as he went down. She usually left her purse in the entrance hall next to the front door, but not tonight.

  The kitchen. He went that way and, sure enough, it was on the sink. He opened it and removed the billfold. Eight dollars. No Chevron card. He returned the billfold to the purse and looked around. Where had she put it when she came downstairs?

  He spotted her cardigan across the back of a chair. She’d been wearing the sweater when she came into his room. He picked the sweater up and felt the pocket. Sure enough, there it was.

  He was feeling for the pocket when Sheila came through the door. He pulled out the credit card. “Don’t fuck with me, Sheila. I gotta get my car.”

  “Don’t fuck with you. Don’t fuck with me! Gimme that!”

  Again she extended her hand and snapped her fingers. The action itself was a slap in the face, and he reacted with rage. He lunged forward. She opened her mouth to scream a moment before his left hand slammed against the side of her head, stunning her.

  His right hand darted forward, his fingers closing on her throat.

  She kicked him and twisted loose. He open-handed her again, hard enough to knock her against a table, which slid across the floor. A flower vase fell off and crashed on the floor.

  She came at him, flailing with both hands, eyes closed. A bony fist crashed into his mouth and drove a tooth into his lip. He could taste his salty blood. He bent over to spit it out away from his body where it wouldn’t get on his clothes.

  Sheila used the respite to whirl and run for the front hall and the telephone. She was gagging. His crushing fingers had hurt her throat. Her indignation was gone and she was terrified.

  In the kitchen, he jerked open a drawer and snatched a butcher knife. She heard the clatter as he dug through the drawer; then the sound of it slamming shut. The phone was a rotary. It took precious heartbeats for nine to spin back so that she then could dial one. She never got to the last digit.

  “Hey, stool pigeon bitch,” he said, standing in the doorway with the severed telephone cord. The big knife was hidden down by his leg.

  She dropped the phone and turned to run. Two strides and her foot slipped on a throw rug across a hardwood floor. She did a split and fell on one hand.

  He leaped on her back like a predatory cat. His fingers were claws entwined in her hair, twisting her head so her throat was exposed. He raised the butcher knife and drove it down where neck meets shoulder.

  It was as if he’d stabbed a wine sack. When he pulled the blade free, a fat stream of blood followed it like a geyser, spewing onto the wrist and forearm of the hand holding her hair. He tried to shift his body position to avoid the blood. He might as well have turned on a hose; now it was spraying onto the front of his pants.

  Still she struggled wildly, banging her elbow into his thigh, fighting for her life even as it poured out of her.

  He struck again. This time she hit the blade with her forearm, which was sliced to the bone at the wrist. She managed to deflect it from her heart, but it cut through her right breast and opened the flesh over the ribs. When the blade hit bone, his grip slipped because the handle was covered with slippery gore. His hand slid down over the blade and his fingers were cut deep. He let go of the knife and stepped back.

  Her strength gave out and she went limp and fell. She spasmed, and in another minute she expired. She was lying in a virtual lake of her own arterial blood.

  When Mad Dog looked down, his bare feet were in the same puddle of blood. He raised a foot. The blood had suction. Like a fly, he thought. He took a step, then another, then sat down in the chair next to the telephone stand, looking at his footprints in blood. He would have to clean them up. They had to be like fingerprints, identifiable.

  As he sat looking at the horror, a great wave of drowsiness rose through him. Terror surged. Something was wrong. Had she somehow poisoned him?

  “Mommy! Mommy!” The noisy stairs gave off their squeak. She was coming down. “Mommy … are you all right?”

  “Stay up there,” he bellowed, jumping up.

  Too late. He saw her legs; then her head as she bent over to look. He lunged at the stairs. He’d hoped that he could let Melissa sleep while he hid the body and cleaned up the mess. Then tomorrow he would put Sheila in a grave somewhere in the vast northwest forest. If questions were asked, he would brazen it out.

  Now it was different. She had seen the truth. He bounded up the stairs and followed her into the bedroom. She was across the bed. “You killed my mother,” she screamed.

  As he moved forward, she tried to slide away. He was too quick, grabbing her wrist with one hand and reaching for a pillow with the other.

  She screamed and he dragged her closer. The screams were muffled when he put the pillow over her face. Her limbs thrashed as he forced her head down. Then he got both hands on the pillow and raised up, as if doing a push-up, crushing the pillow down over her face. Her feet beat against his legs. They might as well have belonged to a butterfly. “Die! Please die!” he begged.

  It seemed to take forever, but finally the struggle ceased. By then he was also reeling, fighting unconsciousness, thinking that he was also dying. Then he realized it was the Valium he’d taken, not poison. He was bombed, not dying. The realization made him quit the struggle. The Valium had pulled him down. He closed his eyes and fell asleep on the bed beside the child’s body.

  In the morning, when he awakened with a pounding headache, for a moment he thought it had all been a nightmare. Then he saw the little corpse, waxy white because the blood had all drained toward the bottom of the cadaver. The truth proved to be worse than the nightmare.

  He sat up and saw his bloody footprints across the floor. He had a lot of cleanup to do. He had to hide them somewhere until he could drive into the mountains and bury them where they would never be found.

  Money. He needed money, too. The credit cards. Sure. He knew the numbers on the MasterCard so he could draw fifteen hu
ndred in cash. He could take orders too, half price of what they cost, from people on things he could buy with the card. Thank God he had a little money. It saved him from a desperate move, like a robbery. This way he could move to Sacramento and wait for Troy.

  He stood up. When he moved the headache was worse. He went for aspirin; then went downstairs to look at Sheila. The pool of blood had coagulated. He couldn’t believe a body held that much blood.

  Was she starting to smell? He sniffed the air. He couldn’t be sure—but he knew it would be soon. Bodies turned putrid real fast at room temperature.

  2

  Around the teamsters local, it was assumed that Charles “Diesel” Carson had gotten his nickname because he weighed two hundred and sixty pounds and was as relentless as a train in a brawl. Actually his name had been attained in reform school, when he played football once without a helmet and they began to call him Dieselhead. The name fit, so it stayed. It had been shortened a bit to “Diesel.” His wife called him Charles.

  Nineteen years after reform school, three years after parole from San Quentin, Diesel Carson was off parole. He had a wife, Gloria, a kid named Charles, Jr., and a three-bedroom tract house in a suburb of San Francisco. He belonged to the Teamsters, and he was a favorite of the local’s officers. He did them favors such as punching out anyone who didn’t agree with how things were done. He was loyal. Who else would give an ex-con a job, even a lousy job, much less a good job.

  Diesel also took contracts (not murder contracts) from Jimmy the Face and others. He’d set something on fire, or break somebody’s arm, but he refused to murder for money (punch a ticket was the operative term) because it was an automatic death penalty and he could never be sure the person who sent him could keep his mouth shut if the police had him alone in a back room somewhere, telling him he could go home if he just confirmed what the police knew already. No telling what someone would say. Murder played on some guys’ minds. They wanted to confess. Bobby Butler had confessed a prison murder two years after the fact. They took him out and gave him a life sentence. He deserved it, the damn fool. The founders of the Aryan Brotherhood had also gone crazy. Three years after Jack Mahone, one of their members, left Folsom, he walked into a police station and told the cops, “I wanna tell you about this murder that me and Tank Noah committed eight years ago.” Poor Tank went to death row over it. Diesel wasn’t afraid of prison, but the gas chamber made him nervous. It was almost silly considering how few actually went to the gas chamber, although there were plenty waiting for appeals to run out. Diesel would kill someone, but he would never trust another human being to know about it—nobody but Troy, that is. He trusted Troy all the way.