Larry Boots, Exterminator

by John Inman

  “Larry!” Kenny gasped. And no sooner had he spoken my name than Davis yanked unmercifully at Kenny’s hair, wrenching his head back, dragging his face up into the rain. While he held Kenny helpless, kneeling at his hip, crouching in the mud, Davis smiled benignly at me, like he hoped I was having as good a time as he was.

  Even under the brief slashing flares of lightning searing the sky above, I could see that Davis’s eyes were bright and wild, the pupils wide black holes leading into a soul that was just as dark. He was strung out on meth. Tweaking out of his mind. I knew the look. I had seen it before.

  “Let him go,” I stated flatly, fighting for control of my voice, trying to stay calm, still squinting into the rain and shivering with cold. I noticed Kenny was shivering too, crouched there in the mud in nothing but the one pair of jeans he had brought with him to the house. His pale chest was smeared with mud, and already a bruise had risen on his breast. There was a deep scratch on his cheek that grew red now and then before the blood was washed away, over and over again, by another sweep of rain. There was fear in his eyes as he knelt there, staring blindly into the storm above his head. But there was fury too. And humiliation. Two emotions I never thought I would see on that sweet face.

  I tore my gaze from Kenny and stared at Davis instead. Of the three of us, he was the only one halfway dressed for the weather. He was wrapped up in what looked like a hunting jacket. He had a woolen watch cap pulled low over his ears. As far as I could see, he was unarmed, although I supposed he might have a gun stashed in one of his coat pockets. I doubted it. If he had a gun, he would have had it out by now, brandishing it in my face like the bully he was.

  “Let him go,” I said again.

  Davis grinned, his tobacco-stained teeth flashing brown beneath a brief strobe of lightning. Then his grin widened. His grip on Kenny’s hair tightened, and Kenny winced as his head was twisted farther back to an impossible angle. Davis watched me to see what my reaction would be, but I purposely didn’t give him one. I stared blankly into his eyes, trying to hide my hate for him and my fear for Kenny.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked. “How did you know I was following you?”

  At that, he really did laugh. “Do you honestly think you’re the only one who knows how to stalk somebody? The only one who knows how to trace license plates?” He glanced at Kenny, then back to me. “Who paid you?” he asked. “That’s what I want to know. Who paid you to come after me? Was it the boy’s parents?”

  I stood motionless. Rummaging through my options, I quickly decided they were few. “The boy’s parents had nothing to do with it,” I lied. “And I haven’t been paid anything yet. The money doesn’t come until you’re dead.”

  He seemed to find that amusing. “And when will that be, do you suppose?”

  “Shortly,” I said quietly.

  At his hip, Kenny threw a yelp of encouragement my way. Apparently Davis didn’t find that amusing. He wrenched Kenny’s head so far back that Kenny wailed in pain. Kenny had his arms over his head, hanging on to Davis’s arm like a man dangling from a cliff. There were tears on his cheeks now, mixing with the rain. Still, there was rebellion on his face. Davis’s cruelty hadn’t obliterated it yet.

  I took a step forward, and in response, Davis wrenched Kenny’s head back even farther. Kenny gasped and tried to fight back, doing an odd little dance on his knees in the mud. Davis reached down and slapped him in the face, and Kenny quieted. His lips were blue with cold. It looked like his teeth were chattering just as much as mine.

  Davis turned back to me. With his free hand he tapped himself in the side of the head. A little finger point, the international symbol for bragging about your own intelligence. He looked like he was having fun. “Pressure points,” he said.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “What? What did you say?”

  “Pressure points,” he said again, dragging the words out slowly as if talking to a child. “When you want someone to do what you want them to do, you have to apply pressure at the proper pressure points. I figured you had two, Mr. Boots. That crazy old bat you call a mother, and this little blind faggot at my knees. I couldn’t decide which one to go after first, so I flipped a coin, and the faggot lost.” He threw his head back and blasted an insane laugh up into the trees. I wondered how many birds were suddenly scattering for the hills.

  “The faggot and the old lady’s garden gnomes,” Davis rambled on. “That was fun, don’t think it wasn’t. You’d have thought I killed all the members of her book club or something when I smashed those little fuckers into the ground.” He eyeballed me seriously for a second. “You really should have her mental health looked into. She’s crazy as a bedbug, you know.” Then he barked out another laugh. “And getting you here was a cinch, wasn’t it? Leave the faggot’s cane in the mud at your mother’s house. Broken in two. A little symbolism, huh? Worked like a charm. Here you stand. Just as helpless and mind-numbingly stupid as I knew you’d be.”

  “The note that said I See You,” I said, trying to stay calm, trying to keep him calm. “Inside your apartment. That was for me, wasn’t it?”

  He seemed to find the question amusing, yet somewhat beneath him to have to answer. “Of course it was for you. I knew you were watching me. How could I miss you? You’re not exactly a stealth ninja. I knew you’d sneak your way into my apartment sooner or later.”

  “I notice you didn’t try to hide the drugs.”

  This comment he seemed to find utterly surprising. “Why should I? I have nothing to fear from you. Hell, you’ve probably killed more people than I have. What are you going to do? Turn me in to the cops?”

  “Why did you kill Jim Cotton? You didn’t have to do that. He was no threat to you.”

  Davis’s lazy smile crawled across his face like some sort of disgusting fat tobacco worm slithering across a leaf. Again, he glanced down at Kenny before answering. “I did it to send you a message. Plus I owed the old fucker a little payback. He’s the one who turned me in to the cops after… the accident.”

  His words were coming fast and furious. He was practically tripping over his tongue to get them out. It wasn’t the cold; it was the drugs coursing through his system. I could tell just by listening to him.

  “You know,” I said, “you’re chattering like a fucking typewriter. You’re really tweaking, aren’t you? How much meth did you snort today? Twelve lines? Fifteen?”

  He looked defensive for once. That surprised me. Was his drug use actually beginning to turn on him? Had he finally reached that plateau where meth no longer heals but starts tearing things apart? Rather than enjoying the highs of his addiction, was Davis beginning to suffer through the depths of it, as all tweakers eventually do? Rather than wallowing happily in the rush of it, was he finally beginning to fall apart under the sheer weight of all the speed coursing through his system?

  Stubbornly, he remained silent, but anger flared in his eyes as he glared at me. He also cast furtive glances at the surrounding trees and shadows. Maybe he was having second thoughts. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe he was simply starting to crash, and he needed another snort of meth. Another hit. Another line.

  Whatever the problem was, I could see his options dwindling inside his head, and I didn’t like that. It meant he was getting desperate. It meant he might do anything.

  And then he did.

  Pulling a knife from his jacket pocket, he pressed the tip of the blade to Kenny’s throat. Kenny and I both froze. Kenny’s empty eyes opened wide like flowers. His lips parted, and I could hear him gasping for breath over the thrashings of the storm.

  “Don’t hurt him!” I pleaded. “Talk to me, Davis. We can get through this. You don’t have to hurt anybody else.”

  Davis turned his eyes on me. For the first time, as he squinted against the driving rain, I saw anguish on his face. It almost took my breath away, seeing emotion on the face of a person I thought incapable of expressing emotion at all.

  “If you w
ant to talk about the accident,” I said soothingly, “let’s talk about the accident.” As I spoke, I took a small step forward, drawing closer. Across the glade, the gurgle of the storm-fed stream was growing angrier. It sounded like it was getting deeper, the water running faster, more furious, tripping over itself as it cascaded down the side of the canyon and flooded into the streambed. But I pushed it from my mind, focusing all my attention on Davis. And on Kenny still crouched there on his knees in the mud, held in check by the cruel fingers twisting in his hair.

  “I didn’t mean to kill that boy,” Davis blurted out. He stared down at Kenny again, turning the knife in his hand so that the blade twisted and twisted, the tip of it spinning on Kenny’s skin. An ounce more pressure would send it slicing into him.

  “He shouldn’t have been on the street, the little fucker!” Davis railed suddenly. “He shouldn’t have been on the street at all!”

  “So it was the boy’s fault,” I quietly said, trying to keep my sarcasm to a minimum. “You should have told the police that. Maybe they’d have understood.”

  Davis turned his tweaked-out eyes to me. Anger once again raged in their depths. When he spoke, there was a tension in his voice like a rope about to snap. A scream about to blow. A volcano about to erupt. “I couldn’t tell the cops, you idiot! They already had me down for two drunk-driving arrests! They would have sent me away forever, whether it was my fault or not!”

  I took another casual step closer. Davis didn’t seem to notice.

  “So you threw the kid into the gutter like a dead cat,” I said calmly, rationally. “I understand. You couldn’t let yourself be involved.”

  “He wasn’t, though,” Davis said, his voice more anguished now, his knife hand beginning to tremble.

  “He wasn’t what?” I asked, my eyes nailed to that knife at Kenny’s throat.

  “He wasn’t dead,” Davis said. And at that, I lifted my eyes to his face.

  “What?”

  “He wasn’t dead,” Davis repeated. “Not when I dragged him to the gutter. He was trying to talk. The kid was trying to say something.”

  Hate surged through me like the growing floodwaters gurgling close by. “And still you didn’t try to help him? You could have called the paramedics. You could have phoned for help, then disappeared. They wouldn’t have had to know it was you.”

  Davis was shaking his head. He had been shaking it since I started talking. His expression grew angrier and angrier.

  And more uncertain, I thought. More ashamed. More panicked.

  Davis mumbled under his breath, the knife twisting, twisting in his trembling fist. Kenny was frozen at his feet. I was frozen in the mud ten feet away. Closer to the trees, the grumble of tumbling water had grown louder and more intense. The rainwater washing down the hillside and across the canyon floor wasn’t a babbling brook anymore. It was a torrent. And it was angry. As angry as John Allan Davis.

  “I knew he wouldn’t make it,” Davis spat into the rain. “He was really hurt. Blood was everywhere. It was on the front of the car, splashed all the way across the hood. I had to pull his bloody baseball cap out of the grille. I had other things to think about than trying to help a kid who was practically dead anyway.”

  Davis was talking faster now, either from guilt or because the meth had kicked higher. Either way, he was getting manic. The knife in his hand was beginning to frighten me more and more. Kenny was weeping softly. He looked like his neck was about to snap. He knelt there in the mud, shaking like a leaf, his face gripped with pain. He was listening, listening. To us, to the storm, to everything. It was all he could do. Listen. And wait. I knew that Davis could slit his throat in the space of a heartbeat, and I would be helpless to stop it. And that, above all else, I could not allow to happen.

  Without warning, Davis turned his anger on me. His eyes narrowed, his back straightened. His fingers flexed, and he took a firmer grip on Kenny’s hair and on the knife at Kenny’s throat.

  He opened his mouth to speak, and at that moment, lightning struck. A flash of fire and sparks exploded from a tree farther down the canyon, maybe forty yards away. The thunder that accompanied the lightning strike did not follow behind it, but blasted out immediately, causing all three of us to shrink in fear. In the distance, but far too close for comfort, the tree that was struck screeched out in anguish and toppled toward the ground amid a blaze of sparks, ripping through the smaller trees beneath it, landing with a crash. When it struck, the earth seemed to tremble at our feet.

  At that moment, I felt water seeping into my shoes. I looked down. The water in the creek bed had spilled over the banks and was now spreading out, boiling across the canyon floor. The sound of rushing water grew louder, more desperate.

  Davis seemed not to notice any of it. His hateful gaze was still leveled unveeringly at me.

  “You wouldn’t leave me alone!” he yelled, his words whipping through the wind and rain like darts. Accusing. Offended. “You just wouldn’t leave me alone! You wouldn’t back off!”

  And at that moment, as quick as a snake, taking Davis and me both by surprise, Kenny swatted the knife away from his throat and took a fistful of Davis’s crotch in his hand. With a triumphant scream, he squeezed Davis’s balls as hard as he could. Davis wailed in fury and pain, rearing back and striking Kenny across the face. He lifted his foot and kicked Kenny’s chest, hurling him into the mud.

  I didn’t plan, I didn’t think, I simply acted. With Kenny safely away from the knife, I sprinted directly at Davis, catching him around the waist like an offensive tackle and driving him five or six yards backward into a stand of yucca, where we both crashed to the ground. The water was already past Davis’s shoulders as I held him down on his back in the mud.

  I was so mad, I forgot the cold and rain completely. When Davis’s fist came up and caught me in the jaw, I immediately struck back, catching him dead center in the mouth. I felt one of those brown, ugly teeth slice through my knuckle. His hands flew up and circled my throat. Victory flashed in his eyes, but only for a second. Before he could apply any pressure, I groped for a large stone that I spotted lying in the mud at the side of his head. It was too big for my fist, so I clutched it tight in both hands. Wrenching it from the earth, I lifted it high and brought it down in one fell swoop directly into his leering face. Davis’s hands fell away from my throat. With a shuddering exhalation of breath, all movement beneath me stilled.

  It had happened so fast, I was stunned. One moment the stone was in my hands, and then it was over. Only the storm remained, lashing at the world around us. Beating at the treetops above our heads. I lifted my eyes from the corpse beneath me and gazed skyward, as if surprised to see the storm still there at all.

  It was Kenny who brought me back. His hands pawed at me. His expressive, gentle hands. “What’s happening?” he sobbed. “What’s happening? Larry, are you all right?”

  I pushed myself off the unmoving body and stepped back, scooping Kenny into my arms as I did. I was a tremor of adrenaline. Kenny was shaking with fear and cold. Together, we were an earthquake.

  “It’s all right,” I stammered, staring down at the still body in the mud. “He’s dead, I think. You’re safe.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I did.”

  Kenny buried his face in my chest. He clutched at the back of my soaking shirt. “I knew you’d come,” he whispered against me. “I knew you’d come for me. I knew you’d keep me safe.”

  I could only nod, still not quite sure how I had done it.

  The water was up to our ankles now. Icy and somehow slimy. Unclean. Where Davis lay, the water was even deeper. With more and more urgency, the water continued to spill over the banks of the streambed and collect at our feet. Davis’s body was pulled upward from the plants that held him in place, lifted by his growing buoyancy. He bobbed atop the deepening water as blood oozed from the massive wound in his face.

  Kenny pulled me backward toward higher ground. A
way from the water. I guess even without sight he could feel the rising of the hillside beneath us and the encroachment of the water closing in around us.

  Oh so slowly, Davis’s still body began to shift, captured by the growing current. His corpse listed and rolled over facedown in the water, as if twisted by unseen fingers. His feet and legs slewed around to point south, dragged by the current to point down canyon where the water flowed.

  Kenny and I stood on a muddy knoll, away from the reach of the rising water. Kenny’s face was still pressed against my chest. He clutched at me with trembling hands. He was crying softly. I stroked the back of his neck and continued to watch Davis’s lifeless body bobbing in the water. Glad that I was the only one who could see it. Glad that Kenny wouldn’t have the memory of it trapped in his mind for the rest of his life like I undoubtedly would.

  I tensed and looked uphill to the north. With a sudden gush of sound and fury, a roiling, splashing two-foot wall of water came cascading down through the center of the canyon from somewhere off to our right, sweeping everything away in its path. Trees, stones, earth.

  I had barely enough time to pull Kenny back out of danger. The next time I looked, when a stroke of lightning made it possible to look, I saw that Davis’s body was gone. Vanished.

  Washed away in the flood.

  Epilogue

  THREE DAYS passed before an anonymous neighbor reported a derelict Ford LTD abandoned on our street. Later that day, the car was towed by a representative of the Big Tow towing service, and we never saw it again. Nor did anyone come to our door to ask about it.

  Three days after the car was towed, an unidentified male corpse was discovered, snagged on a branch, in a flood channel five miles away in one of the seedier parts of town. How the body came to be in the flood channel, and from what location the body made its way into the water to begin with, was never determined by the authorities. By fingerprints and what dental records there were, since the corpse apparently hadn’t spent much time with a dentist—or on oral hygiene at all for that matter—the body was eventually identified as John Allan Davis, shitheel extraordinaire. I spotted the death notice in the local paper. Three lines, one paragraph, no hoopla. Nothing else was ever printed about his death. Or life. No funeral services were announced. No snapshot posted in the Obituaries by loving relatives. Nothing. And most importantly of all, no one came knocking at our door to ask about him either.