Spilled Blood

by Brian Freeman

  He planted each step softly. His pulse thudded through his throat and made a roar in his brain. Drooping pine branches scraped his face like fingers, startling him. He stopped, listening. Something scurried in the brush, a small animal alarmed by his presence. The river water slapped on the bank. In the still air, he heard a murmur of voices. Someone laughed.

  The lights of the last house were twenty yards away. Kirk’s house.

  A yellow light bulb flickered like Morse code on one corner of a detached garage. The bulb on the other corner, closest to the house, was burned out. He saw an F-series pick-up truck parked outside. The house itself was small, one story, with peeling white siding. The front porch was dark. So was the deck, overlooking the river. The lights he saw, and the voices he heard, came from the near side of the house, beyond the garage. A square glow framed the window.

  Chris approached the pick-up, which was spattered with mud. Between the garage and the house, the wet ground was covered with long brown grass. The flickering light on the wall of the garage cast faint, moving shadows. He veered to the corner and used the sleeves of his shirt to turn the hot bulb until it went black. He was invisible now for anyone who looked into the woods. He crossed to the house and crept toward the rear window. It was a casement window, cranked open, with no screen. The voices got louder. He distinguished two sets of male voices. Kirk wasn’t alone.

  Chris peered inside the bedroom. A king-sized bed was shoved against the nearest wall, immediately under the open window, with no headboard. The bed was empty, the sheets and blankets tousled into knots. He saw a high-definition television on the other side of the room; the screen was at least fifty inches wide. An elaborate weight-training system was positioned in the corner. The walls were painted navy blue, and he saw several crushed holes in the sheetrock, the size of an angry fist.

  Kirk Watson sat in a leather recliner. His chest was bare, and he wore checkered boxers. His long hair was loose around his shoulders. His arms and legs bulged with well-defined muscles. In the doorway of the bedroom, Chris spotted Lenny Watson, smaller and younger, still with a bandage on his face. Lenny stared straight at Chris, and Chris tensed, expecting the kid to shout. Instead, Lenny kept talking to his brother, unable to see into the darkness outside the window.

  ‘Six in the morning, man,’ Lenny said. ‘Shit, that’s early.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the kind of business I’m going to do at noon in front of the courthouse, Leno. Don’t be stupid.’ Kirk reached for a bottle of beer. ‘You want to stay in bed, you lie there and have a wet dream. I don’t need you.’

  ‘No, I want to come with you.’

  ‘Just make sure you’re ready. I’m not waking you up, Leno, got that?’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘I want you in place by six-thirty. Sun’s up at seven.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You remember the deal, right? I drop you at the monument site with the binocs, and you keep your eye on every car heading out of Barron toward the drop site.’

  ‘I got it, man, it’s not the first time.’

  ‘All it takes is one mistake, Leno. You tell me when he’s getting close, you tell me when he heads back to town. He does anything funny, you shout. You smell a cop, you give me the emergency signal, and then you keep your head down and stay put.’

  ‘I won’t let you down, man.’

  Chris heard the eagerness in Lenny’s voice. Brothers picked older brothers for heroes, even when they didn’t deserve it. He didn’t know what scam they were planning, but sooner or later, he was certain that Kirk’s manipulation would lead Lenny in only one direction. Jail or worse.

  Kirk stretched his arms over his head and yawned. He climbed out of the recliner. ‘I could use some pussy.’

  ‘Who?’ Lenny asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Who do you think?’

  ‘What about that freshman, Sammi?’

  ‘The punk one with the nose ring? Yeah, why not? Toss me the phone.’

  Lenny tossed a cell phone to his brother, and Kirk dialed.

  ‘Sammi? It’s Kirk Watson. Hey, gorgeous, I’m having a party. Booze included. You want to come? Yeah, bring a friend, fukyeah. Absolutely. I’ll have Leno come get you in my truck. Twenty minutes, and dress like you want it.’

  Kirk switched off the phone. It was that easy, like ordering a pizza. Chris was horrified.

  He also realized he was running out of time to kill.

  ‘Take the pick-up, Leno,’ Kirk told his brother, ‘and don’t get pulled over, doofus.’

  ‘I have to take a dump first.’

  ‘What, girls give you diarrhea, Leno? Sammi’s going to have another girl with her, so don’t go squirting inside your pants, okay? You want seconds when I’m done?’

  Lenny shrugged. ‘Nah.’

  ‘Shit, Leno, you’re not queer, are you?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So why are you always saying no when I get you pussy? Oh, I forgot, the only girl you want is Olivia Hawk.’

  Chris’s whole body went rigid. He waited, like stone, for what happened next. All he wanted was hard proof. Some kind of admission, some kind of confession. He wanted to hear from Kirk’s lips what he had done. He wanted no doubt whatsoever that it meant justice to pull the trigger.

  The words flowed out of Kirk as easily as river water. The meaning was unmistakable. ‘Well, you had your chance, Leno, and you blew it.’

  Chris wanted to scream. This man had just told him what he’d done to his daughter. He didn’t want to use a gun; he wanted to wrap his fingers around this beast’s throat. He wanted to watch his eyes bulge and his blood vessels burst and the oxygen drain from his skin. Kill him.

  Lenny Watson said nothing in response to Kirk’s taunting, but the boy’s face screwed up in what looked like impotent frustration. Then his legs squirmed, and he held his breath as he let out a monster fart. He swore loudly, and he turned and ran for the bathroom.

  Kirk grabbed his knees, because he was laughing so hard. His laughter followed Lenny down the hallway, and Chris heard the bathroom door slam. This was his one chance. Kirk was alone. It was just the two of them. He could pull the trigger and be gone, and no one would know. They would all suspect, but they would never know.

  Silently, he eased the hammer back on the revolver. He slid his finger onto the trigger.

  Kirk turned on the television and rolled onto the bed. He launched a DVD and groaned with satisfaction. It was girl-on-girl porn. A blond with dangling, inflated breasts hiked her ass in the air and buried her mouth between the legs of a brunette who moaned in exaggerated pleasure.

  ‘Shit, yeah,’ Kirk murmured. His hand slipped inside his boxers. A tent developed in the cotton.

  Chris took a step closer to the window. It was the perfect opportunity, a frozen moment in time. Lenny was occupied. Kirk was distracted. The back of the monster’s head was only inches away. All he had to do was fire one shot and watch Kirk’s skull explode in a sticky mass of bone, blood, and brain. He raised the gun. Kirk had no idea what was happening behind him, no sixth sense that death was so close.

  He thought about Olivia. Images of her prone body in the train car, battered and abused, popped in his head like flash bulbs. He breathed faster, so loudly and raggedly that he feared Kirk would hear him, but Kirk’s mind was focused on the naked bodies intertwined in high definition on the big screen. In Chris’s head, Olivia cried. She begged for help.

  The gun was steady in his hand, and his arm didn’t tremble. It would take almost no pressure on the trigger at all. He thought to himself: On three.

  One.

  Two.

  Thr—.

  He tried to fire, but he couldn’t. He thought about Olivia and Ashlynn in the park. Olivia holding the gun. Olivia, desperate for revenge, angry, upset, confused, hurt, alone. His daughter, on the verge of taking an innocent life.

  Kirk Watson wasn’t innocent. It wasn’t the same, and yet it was.

  Chris wanted nothing more
than to kill him, but with each second, the opportunity slipped away, and he knew it was irreversible. Tick tock, tick tock. Lenny would be done soon. Time was running out. It didn’t matter. It could be a second or an hour, and he would still be standing here, unable to fire.

  His arm buckled.

  He removed his finger from the trigger. He disabled the revolver.

  He did just what Olivia had done. He walked away, recoiling in horror at how close he’d come to joining the ranks of the evil.

  27

  Chris didn’t go back to the motel right away, because he didn’t want to spend time with his conscience. He told himself that someone else had stood in the dark, holding a gun to a man’s head. Not him. He wasn’t ready to be alone with a lie. Instead, where the northbound highway split near Barron, he followed the steep bluff toward the hilltop. Maxine Valma lived within a few blocks of the high school.

  The tall black principal answered the door herself. She was still dressed for work, and her needle-thin eyebrows arched in surprise when she saw him. ‘Mr. Hawk.’

  ‘Ms. Valma, I’m sorry to bother you. I hope I’m not interrupting.’

  Her face had the awkward look of someone who was too polite to admit that his arrival was an unwanted intrusion. ‘George and I just got back from dinner in town. He’s putting the kids to bed.’

  ‘I have a couple questions for you. It won’t take long.’

  She shrugged. ‘Come in.’

  Valma led him inside her house. The living room was furnished with antique furniture that had been painstakingly refinished. He saw framed concert posters on the wall from the jazz era heyday in Harlem in the 1920s. The posters looked original. Saxophone music played loudly on the stereo, and Valma lowered the volume as he sat down in an armchair.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr. Hawk?’

  ‘Well, you can call me Chris, for starters.’

  ‘All right. Chris. I stopped by to see Olivia at the hospital. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all. I’m glad you did.’

  ‘I don’t know if she was pleased to see me. She still associates me with Mondamin because of George’s work. However, I wanted to make sure she knew that all of us at the school were thinking of her.’

  ‘I appreciate that.’

  ‘You’re not seeing the true heart of this town,’ she told him. ‘The true heart is good. I really believe that.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘What is it you need, Chris?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, this is a strange question, but do you know if Ashlynn was sharing a class this term with Tanya Swenson? It’s a course on Religious Studies that meets Tuesdays and Thursdays.’

  ‘I’d like to tell you I’ve memorized the class schedule for every student in my school, but I’m afraid I haven’t,’ she said.

  ‘Is it something you can look up from here?’

  She nodded reluctantly. ‘I suppose so. It will take me a moment. My office is upstairs.’

  ‘I really appreciate it.’

  Maxine Valma left Chris alone. He heard the precise click of her heels on wooden steps, and then he heard unhappy voices above him. After a sharp silence, another, heavier set of footsteps thudded to the ground level. A large black man filled the doorway. Like his wife’s, George Valma’s face had a strained politeness, as if Chris were interrupting them from something important. He wondered if they were in the midst of an argument.

  George shook hands like a football player with a crushing grip. He had a rumbling voice that was unusually soft for such a big man. He had wiry gray hair and wore a navy silk shirt with an open collar and gray dress slacks. He was a few years older than his wife, probably in his mid-fifties. Despite his size, he looked fit, not heavy.

  ‘Did Maxine offer you a glass of wine?’ George asked as he sat on the sofa.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’

  ‘It’s just awful what happened to your daughter.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I have two girls. They’re nine and twelve. If someone did anything like that to one of my babies, I think I’d tear their heads from their shoulders with my bare hands.’ George looked like he could make good on his threat.

  ‘We’re fathers,’ Chris said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Your wife told me that you work at Mondamin.’

  George nodded. ‘That’s right. I joined the company when they were acquired. Before then, I worked with the parent company in Missouri.’

  ‘It’s a controversial place.’

  George’s lips wriggled like a caterpillar as he phrased his reply. ‘I’m a scientist. I stay out of politics and PR.’

  ‘Was it hard to move here? Rural areas don’t always welcome strangers.’

  ‘Particularly African-American strangers?’ George said.

  ‘I mean any strangers, but Barron isn’t exactly St. Louis in terms of diversity.’

  ‘You hear a lot more Hank Williams than Charles Mingus in this neighborhood, no doubt about that. I feel like a zoo animal sometimes, but these are decent Christians living here. I can’t say they’ve ever made us feel unwelcome. They’ve taken us into their church. I’m much happier with my girls growing up in this town than in St. Louis. I go to work with a smile on my face.’

  His voice rose oddly as he said this, as if he were trying to convince himself.

  ‘What kind of work do you do?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t say much about it. I’m sorry.’

  Chris held up his hands. ‘I’m not trying to steal your trade secrets.’

  ‘No, but you’d be surprised at the lengths to which people will go. Some companies hire private investigators to ride elevators at trade conferences, in order to eavesdrop on conversations between researchers. Others train hookers to obtain information. It’s a cutthroat business.’

  ‘A lot of money must be at stake.’

  ‘Billions.’

  Maxine Valma returned to the living room, but she didn’t sit next to her husband. Instead, she stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest. Chris thought she didn’t want him lingering in their house any longer than necessary. ‘Are you asking questions about Mondamin?’ she said. ‘I warned you that we’d have to kill you, didn’t I?’

  The joke fell flat. None of them laughed. George shot his wife an uncomfortable glance.

  ‘Anyway, the answer is yes,’ she went on. ‘Ashlynn was in a Religious Studies class with Tanya Swenson this term.’

  ‘Thank you for checking.’

  ‘Was there anything else you wanted?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you know about the relationship between the two girls?’

  ‘I’d be surprised if there was much of a relationship at all, given the situation. Why?’

  ‘Ashlynn called Tanya the day before she was killed. She told her father it was about a school assignment in their religion class.’

  ‘That sounds reasonable.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ Chris said. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry to bother you.’ He stood up from the armchair and then added, ‘Actually, I do have one more question. Ashlynn called you here at home a couple of weeks ago. Do you remember what that was about?’

  The principal shook her head. ‘Students call here a lot, but I don’t remember a call from Ashlynn.’

  ‘Sure you do, Maxy,’ George reminded her. ‘She told you that one of the exit doors in the gym was sticking. She was concerned it was a safety hazard.’

  Maxine blinked, and her face softened. ‘Of course. That’s right. I’d forgotten it was Ashlynn who told me about that.’

  ‘Did she talk about anything else?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Just the typical pleasantries.’

  ‘Nothing unusual about it?’

  She smiled. ‘Sorry.’

  Chris nodded. He was hitting dead ends in every direction. ‘Well, I appreciate your time.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  He shook hands with both of them, and th
e principal led him to the front door. She shut it behind him as he left, and as he reached the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, the porch light went off, leaving the front yard dark. He navigated his way blindly to his car, which was parked at the street, and climbed inside.

  He started the engine and sat in the darkness, thinking. Before he could pull away, someone rapped on the passenger window.

  George Valma was outside.

  He switched off the car, and the bulky scientist got in next to him. George sat uncomfortably with his hands in his lap and his big lips pinched together. He was as large as a bear in the passenger seat. Chris waited. Finally, George swiveled his head and met Chris’s inquiring stare.

  ‘This conversation never happened,’ George said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Maxine and I are careful what we say in the house. We’re never sure who’s listening.’

  ‘Are you saying you think your house is bugged?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it pays to be careful.’

  ‘Who would want to do that? Florian?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe others. There are always people who want to listen.’

  ‘So what is it you want to tell me?’ Chris asked.

  George twisted his fire-hydrant neck in both directions to study the street, as if looking for strangers in the shadows or cars in the neighborhood that he didn’t recognize. When he was satisfied they were alone, he rumbled, ‘The phone call wasn’t what I said it was.’

  ‘Then what was it?’

  ‘Ashlynn didn’t call Maxine,’ George told him. ‘She called me.’

  George Valma gave instructions as Chris drove. They stayed off the north–south highway and instead followed bumpy, unpaved roads through the empty rural lands. Chris quickly got lost in the maze of turns at unmarked intersections, but the scientist had a confident sense of direction. Chris peppered him with questions, but George said little during the fifteen-minute ride.

  ‘Stop here,’ the scientist said finally.