by Jon Loomis
“Exactly. It costs a lot of money, for one thing, and afterward it hurts a lot. You expect that with any surgery.”
“But that’s not enough.”
“Right. I assume you know what happens to people who’ve had prostate surgery.”
“Mr. Floppy,” Coffin said.
Billy cackled, then coughed.
“You all right?” Coffin asked.
“Bronchitis,” Billy said, thumping his chest with a loose fist. “Secondhand smoke.”
Coffin looked at his cigarette, then put it out in one of the green glass bar ashtrays. “Sorry,” he said.
“After prostate surgery,” Billy went on, fixing Coffin with a yellow goat-stare, “Mr. Floppy comes to stay. So you pretty much give up on the sex thing—especially at my age. After a while you make peace with it, and there’s a way it comes as a kind of relief. I mean, desire is a lot of work.”
“So say the Zen masters. The end of desire brings peace and enlightenment.”
“Exactly. It’s like a Zen thing. Sixty-two years old, and for the first time in my life I can think two consecutive thoughts without one of them being about pussy. Amazing. But then along comes Bob Dole and fucks everything up.”
“Bob Dole?”
“Yes, Bob fucking Dole. You know—he did those ads. There he is, this old fart with his withered arm talking about prostate surgery and Viagra.”
“And?”
“And Kathleen’s interested.”
“Yikes.”
“Why don’t you try it, she says. Next thing I know, I’m standing in line at Adams Pharmacy, me and about five other old geezers, getting a prescription filled.”
“So, did it work?”
“Does Bill Clinton like a blow job?”
“So much for enlightenment.”
“Exactly. Kathleen’s decided we’re having a goddamn renaissance in our marriage. The woman won’t leave me alone; she’s leaving little blue pills around the house like a trail of freaking bread crumbs. But that’s not the worst part.”
“It gets worse?”
“It’s opened up a whole new range of possibility, Frank. For the first time in years, I could have sex with any woman who was dumb enough to say yes. It’s staggering.”
“Well, how many could there be?”
“So far, none. But that’s not the point—I’m thinking about it, Frank. Wondering if today might not be the day. I’m on the lookout, for Christ’s sake.” He shook his head, swabbed at the bar with the greasy rag. “It’s really not what I want to be doing with my brain, at this point. It’s ridiculous. It pisses me off.”
“What do you want to be doing with your brain?”
“Pondering the great cosmic mysteries,” Billy said, grinning with his big yellow teeth. “What else?”
As Coffin passed through the dark cemetery on his way home, he saw a furred shape moving like a wraith among the tombstones. Coffin stopped walking, and the coyote turned and stared at him. Its amber eyes glowed in the moonlight.
“What’re you doing out by yourself?” Coffin said. “Don’t you know this town’s gotten dangerous?”
The coyote stared a moment longer, tongue lolling. It seemed to Coffin as though it were about to speak. Then it turned and loped off into the deep shadows, vanishing into the darkness.
Coffin walked past his great-grandfather’s column and the Bledsoe girls’ crypt. He passed the faithful alabaster dog that slept at the foot of Captain Jeremiah Slocum’s grave and wondered, as he often did, whether the dog and the captain were buried together. He turned when he heard the sound of an engine and tires rolling slowly on the gravel road. A blue Chevy pickup was following behind him, lights out.
The pickup rolled to a stop, and the driver gunned the engine twice, the muffler growling as though it had a hole in it. The lights flicked on, blinding Coffin momentarily.
“Rudy,” Coffin said, impatient. “For Christ’s sake. What’s wrong with a phone call?”
He started to walk toward the headlights, shading his eyes against the glare. He heard a hard clank as the driver dropped the truck into gear. The engine roared again, and this time the back wheels sprayed gravel against a row of tombstones and the truck shot forward, coming straight at Coffin.
At first, he didn’t react. He had the odd sensation of being outside his body, watching himself, dazzled by headlight glare as the truck bore down on him. He made his body take two awkward steps to the left, onto the grass—still thinking it must be a joke. The truck veered in response, two wheels halfway down the slight embankment, close enough now that Coffin could hear not just the engine’s rising howl but the suck of air through the intake. The pickup was almost on him before he could gather himself and jump clumsily out of the way, landing belly-down in a muddy ditch as the pickup sped by, side mirror missing his head by a couple of inches.
The truck fishtailed in the road as the driver steered all four tires back onto the gravel and accelerated hard, sliding through a curve before disappearing into the fog, the red glow of one taillight diminishing into the distance.
Coffin lay in the ditch for a moment, ticking through a mental checklist of major body parts. He wasn’t dead. He hadn’t cracked his skull or broken his neck. His arms and legs worked.
He sat up. His wrist hurt. His left pants leg was torn and his knee was bleeding. Wet and smeared with mud, he felt woozy when he stood, so he sat on a gravestone and took deep breaths until his head cleared.
“Holy shit,” he said, still out of breath. “Holy fucking shit.”
Coffin was out of scotch. There was only one ice cube in the tray. He poured a tall glass of vodka, dropped in the ice cube, and called Town Hall. He got Jeff Skillings on the line.
“Somebody tried to run me down just now,” Coffin said. “In the cemetery. Blue Chevy pickup, maybe ten years old. Bad muffler. One taillight out.”
“Jesus, Frank—you all right?”
“Fine. Covered with mud and scared shitless, but fine.”
“You think it was intentional?” Skillings said. “Not just some drunk?”
“It felt pretty fucking intentional. Just get the word out, okay?”
“Sure, Frank. We’ll keep an eye out. You get a license plate, by any chance?”
“Not unless it’s embedded in my ass. Do me a favor—get on the phone with the BMV and have them run every blue Chevy pickup registered on the outer Cape, from Orleans to Provincetown. Maybe the gods will smile and something’ll jump out at us.”
“Sure, Frank. Got it.”
After he hung up, Coffin went into the bathroom and took a hot shower. He put peroxide on his scraped knee. Then he rummaged through his dresser, looking for his father’s gun—a Colt .45 automatic. He finally found it in the hall closet, in a shoe box behind an old set of golf clubs. The clip was empty, but there were five or six bullets, he remembered, rolling around in his desk drawer. He thumbed them into the spring-loaded clip, then slid the clip into the gun butt and slapped it home with his palm. He was too charged with adrenaline to sleep. He refilled his glass and took it and the gun out to the screen porch. He sat on the swing and drank, looking out at the roiling fog. After a while the gun started to make him feel foolish, and he put it back in the closet in its shoe box. The stuffed goat’s head stared at him as he crossed the living room. It seemed amused. Coffin gave it the finger and went to bed.
_______
At 3:00 A.M., the parking lot above Race Point beach was deserted except for two vehicles: a blue Chevy pickup truck and a silver Mercedes. It was very dark; the moon had set and thin, high clouds blurred the stars. Beach grass ruffled in the small wind. Below the dunes, surf whomped and slid. The truck stood empty, the driver’s side door open. Two men sat in the Mercedes. Provincetown was a pale glow above the southern horizon.
“This is extortion, is what it is,” Louie said. “My own cousin. I can’t believe you’re fucking me like this.”
Rudy peered into the fat manila envelope Louie had just giv
en him. “Fucking you? I’m doing you a favor by keeping your little secrets. You should be down on your knees kissing my ass instead of complaining.”
“Frankie’s not buying the drug angle,” Louie said.
“I told you. He ain’t Tony, for Christ’s sake. If I was you, I’d put him on that wacko Kowalski. Keep him busy for a day or two, at least.”
“Kotowski’s his buddy. Frankie protects him. You heard what that lunatic did to me—I’ve still got a lump on my cheekbone. Does Frankie throw him in jail? No. You can’t even count on your own blood anymore.” Louie touched his bruised cheek. “Jesus. I never should have gotten Frankie started on the Merkin thing.”
“I could have told you that,” Rudy said. “You were crapping your drawers about Mancini turning over the wrong rock—and finding you underneath.”
“I thought it was a hookup. Merkin takes some twink out to Herring Cove for a hummer, weirdness ensues, Merkin ends up dead. I thought Frankie’d be able to wrap it up quick and easy and keep Mancini out of my business. How did I know Duarte was going to get himself barbecued?”
Rudy took a joint from his shirt pocket and lit it with a chunky Zippo. For a moment, the smell of marijuana smoke and lighter fluid mingled inside the big Mercedes. “Frankie doesn’t do quick and easy. I used to hate watching him work on a case—he’d drive me nuts. Let me guess: He’s expensing the department for lunches and drinks all over town and it looks like he’s not doing shit, right? But I’m here to tell you—the wheels are turning.” Rudy took a hit from the joint, held it, blew it out. “He’s a nonlinear thinker—jumps around from A to R to Z and back to F until he gets the whole picture. It works, but it’s like watching a bear peeling a grape.”
“That’s the problem,” Louie said. “He’s going to nonlinear my Mediterranean ass out of a goddamn fortune and into the penitentiary.” Louie waved his hands in exasperation. “Do you have to smoke that in here? This is an eighty-fucking-thousand-dollar car, you know.”
“So pull Frankie off the case. You put him on, you can pull him off.”
Louie thought for a minute. “Too risky,” he said. “Then he’d know something was going on.”
Rudy shrugged. “At least this way he has to report back to you.”
“He’s not telling us shit.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. He never told me shit, either.”
Louie groaned, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. “I’m so screwed. I’m a target, you know. Whoever this maniac is that’s killing people—you can bet your ass I’m on the naughty-and-nice list.”
Rudy took another hit from the joint. “Near the top, probably. It sucks being you, ace.”
“Maybe I should let Frankie in on the Project,” Louie said, pushing the power-recline button on the driver’s seat. The moon-roof was open; the clouds were slowly breaking up, sliding away to the east. “Some of it, anyway. Cut him in for fifty grand. He’s broke—why not?”
Rudy scratched his ear. “You could try. Trust me when I say he’s not all that motivated by money. Five to one he pulls the plug on your whole operation.”
Louie groaned again and closed his eyes.
“If you ask me, you’re thinking about this all wrong,” Rudy said. “You’re waiting around for the duly appointed constabulary to protect you, but you can’t tell them you’re a target—and if they really do their jobs, you go to jail. For a smart guy, that’s pretty fucking stupid.”
Louie sat up, looked at his cousin. “You think you can make this murdering nutbar go away?”
“It’ll cost you,” Rudy said.
“Two fifty,” Louie said. “That’ll buy you a hell of a lot of weed.”
Rudy shook his big head. “Two fifty? What am I, some hired stooge? I want points,” he said. “Twenty percent of the gross.”
Louie’s smile disappeared. “You would, you prick. Twenty percent’s outrageous. I can tell you right now, the other partners will never go for it.”
Rudy snubbed out the joint on the Mercedes’s gleaming dashboard and put the roach in his shirt pocket.
“Son of a bitch!” Louie said, pointing at the scorch mark on the dash. “That’s burl walnut you just defaced!”
“I guess you’ll just have to hope Mancini gets lucky. Him and his two goons. Dumb, dumber, and dumbest.” He pulled the big pistol from his jacket pocket. “In the meantime, here. Try not to blow your own dick off.”
“Jesus,” Louie said, hefting the gun in his soft hands. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“If somebody’s hiding under your bed, shoot the motherfucker,” Rudy said. He tapped the barrel. “The bullets come out of this end.”
Louie put the gun in his briefcase. “What about you? If you’re going to be a partner, shouldn’t you be scared, too?”
Rudy grinned, climbed out of the car, stretched, and stood looking out at the dark Atlantic. “I’m like the shadows of the fucking night,” he said. “Nutbar’d better be scared of me.”
Chapter 19
Here’s what I can’t figure out,” shouted Tony over the whoop of the cruiser’s siren. “Why would anybody still eat margarine? I mean, they did that study a few years ago that shows how margarine’s just as bad for you as butter—worse, maybe—but people still buy it. What the fuck is up with that? I mean, what is margarine, anyway? It’s just like this yellow grease, right?”
Coffin blew cigarette smoke out the window; he was smoking one of Tony’s Marlboros. His car had refused to start, so Tony was driving him to the Moors construction site, where a woman’s body had been found by the framing crew when they arrived for work. “Tony,” he said, “not now, okay?”
“Hey, sure. Whatever.”
Tony roared into the compacted sand parking lot, just ahead of the Rescue Squad. Something hung from the skeletal frame of the first, most complete building.
“Holy shit,” Tony said.
It was a woman, dressed in black. She hung, arms outstretched, beside the building’s main doorway.
Lola and Skillings were already there, wrapping the whole construction site in yellow crime scene tape.
Coffin got out of the squad car. “Jesus,” he said. His jaw felt tight, as if his teeth had been wired shut. “She’s been crucified.”
Blood had streamed down her arms, spurted from her feet, run down the side of her face. It was pooled beneath her and had started to dry. There were a great many flies. Something, Coffin realized, had been stuffed into her mouth.
“Who is she?” Tony said, thumbs hooked into his belt.
“Serena Hench,” Lola said. “We found her ID in the car.” The black Porsche sat like a gleaming insect in the parking lot.
“Jesus Christ,” Coffin said. “I just had drinks with her.”
“How do we get her down from there?” Tony said. “With a crowbar?”
The construction crew had all gathered around the two police cruisers in a loose semicircle. One of them spoke up. “I’d break out the Sawzall,” he said. “Cut right through them studs.” The rest of the crew nodded.
“You guys got a ladder?” Coffin said.
One of them, a skinny blond Coffin thought he recognized, trotted off to his pickup and brought back a short aluminum ladder. Coffin carried it up the rough-framed steps to the building’s front deck. Bloody footprints were everywhere—but they stopped next to the stairs, where a pair of rubber Wellington boots stood discarded. A nail gun lay just inside the door, still attached to its long rubber air hose.
Coffin set up the ladder next to the suspended corpse and climbed to the third rung. His stomach lurched and his vision dimmed, and he thought for a moment that he might vomit or faint, or both. Four big sixteen-penny framing nails had been punched through each of Serena Hench’s wrists, into the two-by-four studding of the building. Her knees were bent slightly, and two nails pierced each of her feet. The hair on the side of her head was matted with blood. A nailhead glinted in the sun where it protruded from Serena Hench’s left temple. A b
ig piece of crumpled paper was crammed into her wide-stretched mouth. Blueprint, Coffin thought.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. His vision narrowed, then blurred, and something in the back of his head began to buzz. It was familiar yet terrifying, like a recurring nightmare of drowning or being buried alive. His chest felt tight; he was short of breath. He thought he might be having a heart attack. He climbed down the ladder awkwardly—his legs were rubbery, and both of his hands tingled. He stumbled across the deck and down the stairs.
“Frank?” Lola said. “Are you okay?”
Coffin stared at her for a moment. Her face was weirdly distorted—all eyes and nose. “No,” he said. Then the ground hinged slowly up and hit him hard in the face.
“Frank? Frank?”
Somebody was shaking him. Coffin opened his eyes and scowled, hoping it would make whoever it was stop. A small crowd of people had gathered. A big hand swam into view and tried to press an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. The hand belonged to Ed Voorhees, one of the volunteer EMTs. Coffin pushed it away.
“C’mon, Frank,” Voorhees said. “Just a little oxygen. Make ya feel better.”
“Get away from me, Ed,” Coffin said.
Lola was kneeling, peering down at him. She looked worried. “Frank—you all right?”
Coffin sat up. “Well, I’m not dead. I guess that’s a good sign.”
“You look like crap, Frankie.” It was Tony. He bent down and squeezed Coffin’s shoulder. “You should let the rescue boys check you out. Make sure you’re not having a stroke or something.”
Coffin shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m okay. Just get out of my face.”
A sleek black Lexus pulled into the parking lot. Mancini got out, along with Pilchard, the big detective in the brown suit. Mancini’s jeans were beautifully pressed. He wore artfully weathered loafers and a crisp green polo shirt with a little horse embroidered above the left breast.
“Detective Coffin,” he said. “You do look pale. Everything all right?”
“Never better,” Coffin said, struggling to his feet. “But I’m a little worried about Ms. Hench.” He nodded in Serena’s direction.