The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  A tear in the corner of his eye, he shook his head.

  God, she wondered if he was already becoming his father.

  Jimmy Torrio. Angie had met him in Terra Haute. A week later she was sleeping with him and the transition between stranger and lover had been exceptionally smooth. But Jimmy Torrio was nothing if not smooth. He gave her Danny, who was beautiful and precious, but that’s the only thing he had given her.

  Then why did you keep spreading your legs for him?

  Ah, the question of the day, the year, the century. Why? She had a good job, she was from a good family, at least by Greenlawn standards. Jimmy was an asshole, he was selfish, he was corrupt. He had a criminal record that he had not revealed until she was in too deep to care. He was really good at nothing beyond drinking and gambling and mooching money. He was not even really very good in bed. Yet, Angie had stayed. At least until she’d found out that she was only one of many. Then she ran straight back to Greenlawn, a bun baking in the old oven, no money, and absolutely no self-respect.

  Two years later, she was still obsessed by him. Maybe it was smoldering hate now, but they always said that hate was merely the flipside of love.

  “Can I have two candy bars?” Danny asked.

  “Of course you can,” Angie told him. Why not?

  It was a beautiful day and Angie was thinking about Louis Shears who had just driven by, how he always smiled at her, how his eyes flashed like coins in a streambed and behind that look, just behind it, a touch of heat and a touch of interest. Louis was nice. Louis was funny. But he was also married to Michelle who was a very nice lady. So Angie would admire from afar. As always.

  Across the street, she saw Dick Starling walk by. He was a very nice man. Everyone loved him. His daughter, Brittany, was on the archery team. Angie had won three state championships in archery when she was in high school and Dick Starling had been instrumental in getting her to take the job of archery coach. Angie hadn’t wanted to at first…but she finally submitted. Putting an arrow in a target was not only a great distraction from the stresses of life, it was sheer joy when you imagined that the target was in fact Jimmy Torrio. Bullseye every time, heh, heh.

  She waved to Dick Starling…he did not wave back. He was gripping his head in his hands and staggering up the sidewalk like he had a good hangover going. Angie decided it was none of her business.

  Cal’s was just up the block now.

  Angie grinned.

  Other than archery, tormenting Brandi was her only true joy in life.

  Maybe I should use that bitch for target practice.

  Danny’s birthday tomorrow. Maybe Jimmy was already in town. Sometimes he did that. He’s show up in Greenlawn, look up some of his old cronies and throw together a card game, indulge in a little whoring with cheap sluts like Little Miss Saucy Tits Brandi Welch. Asshole. He’d probably screwed the little witch last night. Maybe this morning. You could never tell, oh God in high Heaven, you could just never tell.

  Angie pushed her buggy through the door of Cal’s.

  There were maybe six or seven people in there, buying bread, examining the beer in the cooler, chit-chatting as people in Greenlawn will do.

  Angie swept the store with acidic eyes.

  Ha, there she was. Right behind the counter: Little Miss Saucy Tits. Look at them everyone, admire them, see how plump they are. Women, wouldn’t you just love to have a set like these and, men, wouldn’t you just love to squeeze them or bury your face in the sweet valley between, yummy-yummy.

  At the sight of her, a slight headache bloomed in the back of Angie’s skull: it was sharp, insistent. It made her squeeze her eyes shut. And for the briefest of moments, it cast a dark shadow over her thoughts. A shadow that she instantly recognized with some fundamental half-submerged awareness that was ancient and misty. It crawled up from within her, breaking the sleep of reason.

  Then it was gone.

  Brandi looked up from her Soduku magazine, pencil pausing, saw Angie and tensed, God how she tensed.

  Angie smiled at her, a lethal meat-eating smile.

  Poor Little Miss Saucy Tits. Look how nervous she is. See how her breasts, so jutting and firm, have deflated somewhat. See how her liquid black eyes shift about nervously like those of a rat wary of the cat. She trembles. Her lips so full and pink and juicy are now pulled into a pale gray line of despair.

  Poor little thing, Angie thought. It’s nothing truly personal, you know, but you shouldn’t have been fucking my ex. He comes to town maybe once a year and you fuck him and I know it and you know it and I’ll never let you forget it.

  Angie lifted Danny from the buggy. “Go find yourself a candy bar,” she said, then turned her full hating attention on Brandi Welch who was already withering away like a flower before October’s first frost.

  “ I’d like a lottery ticket,” Angie said.

  Brandi swallowed. “Um…which kind?”

  “ What kinds do you have?”

  Hee, hee. Make her go through the whole list from Megamillions to the state drawings to instant scratch-offs like Pot-o’-Gold and Million-Gazillion and E-Z Street. It took her about five minutes to go through them all and tell Angie how much they cost and how much you could win, all the unnecessary details. And when she was finished, a fine dew of sweat on her brow, Angie said, “No, I’ve changed my mind.”

  What Angie badly wanted to do was to read the little whoring witch right out in front of everyone. What a scene it would be with little Danny at her side! Just tell Little Miss Saucy Tits what she thought of her in plain terms. Refer to her openly as that part of the female anatomy that you generally reserved for the worst, evil little shrews, the old Cee-U-Next-Tuesday. Which was a word that Angie would not allow herself to say out loud or in mixed company because, dammit, she was from a good family and she was better than that…wasn’t she?

  “ I want some cigarettes.”

  “ Cigarettes?”

  Angie flashed her the dead smile of a window dummy. “Yes, cigarettes.”

  “ I guess…I mean, I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “ Lots of things you don’t know, isn’t there?” Angie told her. “But trust me, Brandi, in time you’ll get to know all about me.”

  Brandi swallowed. She recognized the implied threat and the tension was so thick on her you could have sliced it like cake. “What kind? What kind of cigarettes?”

  “ What kind do you have?”

  Brandi sighed. “Listen, do we have to go through this every time?”

  “ Through what?”

  “ You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

  “ I only know that you’re being very rude to a customer.”

  Danny, damn him, came running up and tossed two Almond Joys on the counter, breaking up the fun which had all the earmarks of being exceptional.

  “Is there anything else?” Brandi asked her, a thin smile on her lips.

  Angie, pissed-off, cheated, and trembling with barely-concealed rage, dug through her purse, clawed through it really, found her wallet…and it was at that precise moment that the little headache blooming in her skull like a corpse-orchid suddenly flowered and its petals filled her head and its fragrance consumed all that she was.

  With moonstruck eyes, she looked from the purse to Brandi, recognizing neither or their place in the scheme of things. She made a guttural grunting sort of sound deep in her throat. Her fingers continued to dig in the purse, finding a wallet, a cosmetic bag, a cellphone, a box of crayons for Danny…things she no longer recognized or understood.

  Then they found something else.

  A box-cutter with a curving steel blade like that of a scimitar.

  Angie had no memory of throwing it in there when she’d sliced open boxes for the recycling. She only knew that it felt good in her hand. It conformed to her palm and begged to be put to use.

  “Um…are you all right?” Brandi asked, caught somewhere between confusion and fear.

  Angie looked up at her, drool
running from her mouth. Her eyes were fixed, staring, almost reptilian. She brought out the box cutter and slashed Brandi across the throat. Brandi stumbled back, shocked, stunned, overwhelmed. Blood bubbled from her torn voice box and she tried madly to stem it with her fingers. It squirted between them like a flow of rich red wine, catching Angie in the face.

  The hot spray of blood was not unpleasant.

  It was pleasing.

  Angie came right over the counter. She slashed Brandi’s outstretched fingers to ribbons, she took the tip of her nose off, she opened one breast, and then she ripped the box-cutter across Brandi’s lovely dark liquid eyes, the hooked blade catching in the left pupil and yanking the bloody, glistening orb out by a section of optic nerve.

  People fled the store.

  But more disturbing, others did not.

  When Angie came around the counter from the hacked, bleeding thing on the floor, two men and one woman stood there, smiling at her, staring at her with dark troglodyte eyes. Eyes that understood. One of the men, middle-aged and balding, stepped up behind her and slid his hands up her shirt, gripping her breasts roughly.

  Angie liked it.

  Her blue eyes were like crystal drowning pools, lips pulled away from teeth. The front of her pink tee was soaked with blood, crazy whorls of it had splashed over her face. She enjoyed the smell of it. It excited her, stirred primal memories of the hunt. She licked it off her lips.

  The others following, she went back behind the counter. She dipped her finger’s into Brandi’s gored throat, swished them around in the wound, then, her fingers dripping with blood, she went over to the wall. She knocked a display of Hostess cakes out of the way, kicked aside a cardboard standee of Dale Earnhardt hawking Budweiser…and proceeded to draw on the wall in blood. Elaborate looping symbols, complex intersecting linear marks, bloody handprints and stick figures, repeating them again and again.

  Using Brandi Welch’s corpse as their palette, the others joined her, covering the walls in ritualistic hieroglyphics that looked oddly like the cave paintings of Paleolithic man.

  They instinctively knew what she was drawing and they followed suit until the wall was crowded with primitive art.

  When Angie walked out of the store, the others followed in her rich, savage blood-wake. It was her scent now and it drew them to her.

  And behind in the store, forgotten but unconcerned, Danny reached into the meat case and found a moist, well-marbled slab of sirloin. It dripped with blood. He brought it to his mouth.

  Humming, he began to suck the juice from it…

  11

  After Louis was long gone, Officers Warren and Shaw and Kojozian stood around staring at the dead boy on the sidewalk, each happily reminiscing about other stiffs they’d been called in on. How they looked, how they smelled, what happened when they tried to bag them up. Warren was an old hand, just like Louis thought, and he seemed to have the best stories by far. But the other two kept trying to outdo him like a couple guys reliving their high school glories on the gridiron.

  Kojozian, who’d only been a cop five years by that point, kept trying to come up with something that would impress Warren. “I tell you about that nut over on Birch Street a couple years back? Some old guy, retired railroad man, he took to the bottle and took to it hard.”

  Warren nodded, as if he’d heard it too many times. “The sauce gets ‘em every time. Take my word for it. I could tell you some stories, boy. The old Sweet Lucy, they get a taste for it, look out, brother.”

  “ Sure,” Kojozian said, “sure. This guy’s got it so bad that his wife decides he’s going cold turkey so she up and locks him in the coal bin down in the basement. Keeps him there like a week. You believe that shit? He’s in there, living in the straw, shitting and pissing himself. She slides food under the door for him, but no booze. She wouldn’t have called us, but she broke the key off in the lock. Well, let me tell you, we broke the door down and the smell that came out…oh boy, not nice. The old man was out of his tree with the D.T. s. He’d torn up his nose, clawed it right to hamburger because he thought there were bugs crawling in and out of it. We took him out and it was no easy bit, he bled all over my uniform shirt, just screaming about the bugs living inside him.”

  Warren just kept nodding, watching the flies gathering on the kid’s corpse. Right then, they were investigating the crater at the top of the head. Warren finished his cigarette and flicked it at them. It scattered them, but the butt lodged right there in the sticky goo coming out of the skull.

  It sizzled and went out.

  Kojozian said, “Hot out today.”

  He yanked his tie off and threw it. Then he unbuttoned his uniform shirt, took it off, and pulled off his T-shirt beneath. He threw it in the grass. He put his uniform shirt back on, but did not button it back up. The sun felt good on his bare chest.

  Shaw mopped sweat from his face, just shaking his head. “Sure, goddamn booze. You remember old Father Brown over at St. Luke? Oh, now that was long before your time, Kojozian. Father Brown was a hell of a guy, let me tell you. That old sonofabitch ran the church, St. Luke’s school, the whole nine yards. Christ, he’d been over there since the forties.”

  “ Forties?” Warren said. “Try the thirties.”

  “ Yeah, well, Father Brown he had quite an operation going over there. Everyone loved him right to death. The church picnic in the summer, the fall carnival, the Halloween spookhouse, the Christmas programs…hell, what a guy. Every old lady in town worshipped that man.”

  “ He used to have supper at our house twice a month when I was a kid,” Warren said.

  “ Sure. He was like that. But what very few in this town knew was that he had an awful thirst. Once a week, usually Thursdays, old Father Brown would just get pissed three sheets to the wind. His housekeeper would always call down to the station and we’d go off looking for him. One time, there he is on Main, leaning up against a parking meter, pissing on the sidewalk.” Shaw was grinning now and couldn’t help himself. “Well, we get out of the squad car and he sees us right away, tells us to go get fucked and when we’re done with that to go fuck our mothers. That’s the truth, Kojozian. He was one mean sonofabitch when he got a bellyful.”

  “ He was,” Warren said. “Christ, was he ever.”

  Shaw went on. “Well, me and my partner, Bill Goode…you remember Goody, Sarge? Yeah, well we had a hell of a time with him. Brown had been a boxer in the old days and he still thought he was. He was swinging at us and we were dodging and ducking, but finally we got him under control. Neither of us thought about his johnson that was hanging in the wind. He pissed all over Goody, saved a few squirts for me. What a goddamn mess that was.”

  Kojozian tried to think of another one, but drew a blank. He worked his shoe under the dead kid’s arm and made it bounce up and down, made the palm of his hand slap the concrete in a jumpy rhythm. Slap, slap, slap-slap-slap.

  “ Boy, I’d hate to get piss all over me.”

  “ Well,” Warren said. “That’s nothing. If all you get in this job is some piss on you, you’re doing all right. We picked up this character on a parole violation out at his house down by the train yards…one of those old houses down there, you know? Well, we came right in and the guy says, I gotta take a shit. Just let me take a shit. But we weren’t buying it. We cuffed him and threw him in the back of the squad car. We’re pulling out of the driveway and he shits his pants. Damn, I don’t think he shit in two weeks. He filled his drawers and it overflowed right down the leg of his pants. Christ, the smell. We took him down to the jail and hosed him off. I spent the afternoon cleaning shit out of the back of the squad car. Every time it got warm in there, even a month later, you couldn’t smell nothing but that guy’s shit.”

  “ Oh yeah?” Shaw said. “I can live with the shit. That’s nothing. It’s the vomit I can’t stand. I pulled over a guy for drunk driving when I was working midnights. I pulled him out of the car and he vomited right on me. It was summer and I had my collar open and
he puked right down the front of my shirt. For the next two hours, my belly is coated with this guy’s puke.”

  Warren just laughed. “Puke is just puke. I ever tell you about the train that plastered that bum the first year I was on the Department? Holy O. Christ. It hit him and he got tossed underneath, cut into about fifty pieces. Middle of goddamn winter and we’re poking around in the snow, bagging up pieces of him. There I was, just green with it, carrying around an arm in one hand and a foot in the other. Another rookie found a hand and he stuffed it in my pocket because we didn’t have anywhere else to put it. We had those old leather coats with deep pockets then. It fit just fine. Well, it was a busy night and I forgot about the hand in there. We got off shift and we went and got loaded. I come home and I hit the hay. You shoulda seen the look on my old lady’s face when she looked through my pockets!”

  They had a good laugh over that one.

  Cars kept coming by, slowing down to get a look and Kojozian waved them along. This was police business here. When they got a look at him, they sped away.

  “ Well,” Warren finally said. “This isn’t getting this stiff off the public sidewalk.”

  “ We need a shovel,” Shaw said.

  Kojozian was wondering where they’d get a shovel when he saw a guy down the block trimming his hedges outside a trim little ranch house. They all saw it same time he did.

  Warren in the lead, they went on down there…

  12

  “ Excuse me, sir,” Warren said, taking his hat off. “We’re on police business here. What’s your name?”

  The guy stood there in blue jeans and a tank top, clippers in hand. He was very neat and immaculate as was the lawn behind him, just as green as emeralds. He was staring at Kojozian. His shirt open, chest glistening with sweat.

  “ What are you looking at?” Kojozian asked him. “You never seen a cop before?”