Deadweight

by Robert Devereaux

  Karin hadn’t answered the phone all day. Frank had tried her twice more, at noon and one. No response. It was now past two. He prayed that Joe’s call had nothing to do with her.

  “Frank, something’s come across the wire I thought you should know about,” Joe said. “You might want to let Karin in on it before the Penryn police call her.”

  Heart leapt at first, then calmed when his friend made it clear that Karin hadn’t been injured or killed, that if she was involved in what Joe had to say, it was only peripherally. “Let her in on what?”

  “Seems something happened over at Pyne Memorial last night. Someone stole a body right out of the ground, and old Sal Romano was savaged by a large animal of some sort. There’s bloody pawprints all over his place. They suspect an attack dog. They found prints along the roadside, him and his owner, leading off toward Loomis and Rocklin.”

  Frank asked where Karin came into the picture.

  “Body snatched was Danny Daniels.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Just what Karin needs.”

  “Not a great time for upset, I gather.”

  “Yeah, she’s been a little obsessive about the son- of-a-bitch. This won’t help.”

  “Maybe me and Laura ought to—”

  “No, no, that’s okay. Let’s play this down. You two come by at four just like we planned. I’ll try her again, cut out early if I can’t rouse her.”

  Joe agreed and hung up. Frank punched in his number, swearing and starting over when his finger strayed off on a wrong digit. Five rings, ten, fifteen. He hung up, got Jeannine’s copy of the Rocklin area directory. No answer at the Gallagher home—Jimmy probably asleep, getting mad at the phone or maybe he’d disconnected it in the bedroom. Come on, Nona, where are you when I need you? Same with Alice Brown, the other next door neighbor, but her boy was at school and Alice was most likely at the Wells Fargo in Roseville Square where she worked. Maybe Karin was there and the phone had inadvertently been turned off, had only appeared to ring. Who would be home at this hour, someone he and Karin were on speaking terms with, who’d be willing to look around? He surveyed the block in his mind. Zack Ryder worked at HP, his wife Millie was a teacher’s aide, and their two teens would be at school. Then he thought of Flora Larchmont, the sharp-eyed eighty-year-old who lived across from Nona and Jimmy and knew everything there was to know about her neighbors. Cared for her bedridden sister Blanche, but the rest of the time she was working at her flowers in the front yard or sitting out there on a lawn chair, from dawn to dusk, observing the lazy movement of the block and clucking her tongue when some fool driver came roaring along at an untoward speed.

  Flora answered on the sixth ring. “Hello?” she said, marbles in her mouth.

  “Miss Larchmont, this is Frank Tanner calling.”

  A pause. “The new neighbor. You and her got rid of that awful Danny Daniels. Glad to see him go. That man was a philanderer of the first water, you know. Carried on with an awful floozy who shall remain nameless.”

  “I’m trying to reach Karin. Have you seen her?”

  “Pretty girl. Amazing talent with flowers, she puts my carnations and bachelor buttons to shame. No, I think she drove off, oh nine-thirty or so. I was inside tending to Blanche’s needs, but when I heard the garage door go up I poked my head out the front door and saw the back end of your pickup truck just turning onto Midas. Turned left so I thought she might be going to Safeway or Payless, garden supplies. Magic fertilizer or something. She surely puts the lie to all those gardening books. Grows whatever she pleases, whether they say it’s the right region or season to do so. Nine-thirty seemed an odd time though. Most of the time, she goes on her shopping expeditions just about one-fifteen. She never came back. I’m a little concerned about her, and I expect you are too.”

  Frank’s thumb nervously stroked the Pilot Razor Point on his blotter. “Would you do me a favor, Miss Larchmont? Would you knock on our door? Maybe see if Karin’s in the backyard if there’s no answer?”

  “Oh dear, I hate to poke my nose that way.”

  “Just this once?”

  She finally agreed when Frank promised he’d ask Karin to give her a few “secrets of the green thumb.” She wrote down his number and he sat at his desk waiting, unable to concentrate on the Malloy case, gripping the Razor Point in both hands, urging Flora Larchmont across the street, a friendly hello at the door or, no, in the backyard, sorry to bother you, your husband has a case of the worries, why don’t you give him a call, I guess when you came back from shopping I must have been out of earshot, I must have been in . . . well indisposed, oh what a lovely garden—come on Flora, come on, the second hand on his walnut-framed wall clock dragging around the clockface—old Flora making her way across the street, his wife sliding the kitchen door open, tugging off her gardening gloves, dropping them on the table, phone now resting in her hand, punching in the numbers, a one for long distance, then seven more—come on, come on, playing back the scenario in his head, five minutes gone by? Felt like fifteen.

  The phone rang.

  “Karin?”

  “She’s nowhere to be found. Drove off, like I said, around nine-thirty.”

  “Did you check the backyard?”

  “Oh yes. Most of the blinds were closed, you know in that frustrating way where they’re almost open but there’s just a tad too little space to slip your eyes in between? The blinds that were open just showed empty rooms, your bedroom, the room with your computer. One thing, though.”

  “What?”

  “The side door to the garage was swung wide open, an invitation to marauders, in my opinion. The doorknob was dirty too, some kind of grit on it, same as on the door into your house. I only mention that because your place is otherwise so well kept. Blemishes stand out on clean faces. The door was unlocked too. Key still in it.”

  “From the garage?”

  “Into the house, yes. I didn’t go in, mind. I only gave it a try and then closed it right away. I don’t feel it’s proper to go barging into other people’s homes.”

  Frank didn’t like what he was hearing. He felt like pleading family emergency and getting the hell out of the office right now. But then he chided himself for letting his imagination get the best of him. He thanked Flora for her pains.

  “Oh, there was one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Looked like some big dog cut a path across a stretch of her flowers. I’m afraid she’s lost a few nasturtiums because some thoughtless pet owner let his dog roam about unleashed. Wasn’t Queenie, her paws are smaller than this dog, but I can’t think who else owns one. Anyway, the paw prints lead right around to the garage and I may have seen some inside the garage too, my poor eyes are going and the light’s none too good in there.”

  ***

  Karin felt exhausted and exhilarated—sunk in Danny’s depravity while exulting in the miracle of her restorative powers—and both as doomed and as alive as she’d ever felt in her life. The first time he had used the broken bottle on Marcie, the blood had spilled from the rent meat of her face, thick as motor oil, spattering the green plastic of the garbage bags with precisely that viscosity. Karin’s skull had felt all scooped out and airy as Danny slashed, dark ecstasy lighting his eyes, that little-boy-lost look she’d known so well from when he’d beaten her, but now an exponential hatred sparked from his face; both the frenzy of her own screams and the savage mutilation she witnessed had brought the floor haltingly to her outstretched hands. Then he was shaking her, slapping her wetly, saying “You need to see this. If you’re going to undo it—and baby believe me you will—I want you to see it.” He’d yanked her off the floor and set her down in a cane chair, white except for where his fingers had touched it. And she had watched, numb with disbelief, as he carved and gouged his victim like a sculptor working clay with a knife. Only this clay clung to life, and bled, and suffered, and at last there were too many lacerations and too much misery and
the woman on the couch checked out, all at once.

  It had been a mercy to see her go.

  And then Danny had lifted her chair, as easily as if it were empty, and set her down in front of his handiwork, saying “Heal the fucking cunt,” forcing her hands into the slick red muck of her, egging her on, until at last there came a point at which Karin had cried herself out, sunk to exhaustion, abstracting what she touched: not the cooling ribboned flesh of a dead woman, but dripping tenderloin, no worse than what she’d had to deal with in preparing a meal. And, if only to break free, to get Danny’s bloody hands off her and be able to walk around, she calmed her mind and brought back how she’d felt at his grave—power in her hands, power from the heart of her soul. Massaging the woman’s torn skin, she saw that the slashes were thin, not deep, though numerous and criss-crossed like uncooked hamburger patties. Her hands tingled like humming scalp massagers. She felt healing happen before she saw it, but she did see it, miraculous as nature itself, and it elated her and drove her deeper, her will to heal penetrating the flayed flesh until at last, in a sudden jolt that thrilled her, Marcie came back, lids fluttering like electroshock, deflated lungs suddenly filling and then emptying with the most gut-wrenching scream Karin had ever heard, worse even than in Marcie’s agonies of torment. She lifted her hands off—hot stove!—then quickly replaced them, frantic to soothe the poor woman’s suffering, to eradicate the pain her sick husband had inflicted. It had felt beautiful to heal, empowering, knowing now what she was doing and what a gift she’d been blessed with—not in the dark like she’d been at the grave, unclear why she’d felt so elated making grass seed grow. She’d closed her eyes and touched Marcie everywhere, hearing the screams die down and her groans be replaced by easy sighs of contentment. She looked a mess, spilt blood pooling like aspic stuck to her body while new blood coursed through her veins, her long hair clumped and reddened about her shoulders, her white skin mottled with what looked like uneven sunburn. But there were also the beginnings of a smile as Karin palmed Marcie’s forehead, a mother feeling her child’s fever gone.

  Then Danny had said, “Nice work, old girl. Now let’s see if you can handle a real challenge.” He clattered the blanket of swords onto the floor and Karin pleaded with him to leave Marcie alone, but all she got for her pains were a punch to the solar plexus, a blackened eye, and a beating that made her bones ache. Her face to the floor, she heard the short sharp unzip of his pants, followed by the jingle of his belt, and fully expected the crude rape he’d favored in his last months of life. Instead Marcie’s ragged voice again pierced the cabin air.

  Karin turned and saw Danny, his Cavalry Sabre in one hand and his pants at his ankles, sink the sword deep into Marcie’s right thigh and twist it this way and that, then pull it out and stopper her up—Dutch boy thumbing a dike of blood—with his penis. “No!” she found herself urging over and over, uncontrollably, hugging herself and rocking on the floor, almost to the rhythm of Danny’s hump, while he fired angry words at her, the same ones over and over, weaving through her whine just like their fights at home, his domineering bark denying her high-pitched wails until he’d whipped out of the woman, stiff prick flailing blood, and pummeled Karin, saying over and over, “Fuck you, kill you, eat you, love you.” He’d left her on the floor, gone back to Marcie, burrowing flesh and steel inside her, but Karin blocked most of it out. And when he yanked her back to the couch, what he thrust her hands into this time was utter devastation, the body cavity wrenched open, organs collapsed and battered and punctured, hacked ropes of gut sprung confusedly this way and that, a heart sliced neatly across and hinged apart in her chest like a halved grape. Karin had cried dry tears over it, her throat hurting with the effort. “Fix it!” Danny had said, and she’d wailed “I can’t, I won’t,” but he wore her out and at last her hands gathered the flowering guts together like a drunk weeping over spilled laundry, and then the power was back, quicker and more certain this time, and it felt good to caress all the pieces back together, to bring that same intensity of love to bear she felt for her daisies and her dianthus and her dwarf asters, only more urgent, bent more fiercely to revival.

  Almost more monstrous than Danny’s renewed assault on the woman and the warped sexual bent it had taken had been the steel-jawed, manic enthusiasm of his outrages, still a lost-boy look in the eyes but blizzard-buried beneath an alien ferocity. Karin felt now as if she were tracking in reverse along that maniacal fury, undoing it, peeling it back. It seemed graspable, Danny’s manifest rage, a slick cable passing through her fingers. He was the mugger, she the surgeon, learning the other’s loathed craft by undoing it. She wondered, as she let the life force flow into the unmangling corpse, if she couldn’t reverse it too, draw it out, not of Marcie but of Danny. But then the hardly half healed woman had jolted alive again, rasp-screaming from a pair of lungs multiply punctured, collapsed, shredded, not yet revitalized, and all Karin’s energies were bent to the swift reconstitution of organs, breasts, muscle flesh, and the skin that held it all in. All else, she shut out. By the time she finished, she was dripping with sweat, blouse drenched and stinky, hair like soaked yarn. The woman who moved beneath her hands had no voice left, but Karin could hear her saying “No, no, no,” over and over, a melancholy heartbeat as the pain subsided, a wish never to have gone through revival again, and then a swiftly building terror implied in the no-voice’s tightening.

  His hand on her shoulder. “Nicely done, sweet fuck. Old Marcie looks more appealing every time you bring her back. Ain’t that right, Marcie babes? You and me, we’re sort of kinfolk. The living dead.”

  Exhausted, Karin looked up at him. He was naked, his chest oddly pale against the crimson dye on his hands, his arms, his aproned thighs, his stiffened penis. His other hand gripped the hilt of his gold-plated Excalibur, whose point dug into the floor straight below.

  “Now once more, and this time, no half measures. I’m going to skewer the bitch, rapiers every which way I can. Then finish with this baby, thirty-five inches of tempered steel sheathed in snatch right up to its cruciform quillion. Be like old King Arthur fucking her brains out. If she’s got any kick in her after that, I’ll work on crushing her bones, really check out your limits.”

  Karin rose. “I won’t,” she said. There was no spunk in her, but she knew she was done.

  “Fuck if you won’t.”

  She raised her fists and beat on his chest, a feather on granite, given her exhaustion, but she kept it up. “No more,” she said. “No more.”

  He laughed. “I can’t believe it. You’re raising your hands to me. First you talk back, then you hit. Oh sure, you pulled a kriss off the wall once and stuck it into my heart. I haven’t forgotten—hey, you’re starting to piss me off with that shit, stop it—but that wasn’t you, not really, and we both know it.”

  Her fists fell, drifts of snow, on his chest.

  He raised the sword a few inches and slammed it into the floor. It stuck there, quivering from the thock. He faced Karin, took her earlobes, tore them up and out just a fraction, paper cuts widening, enough that she cried out, felt twin trickles of blood runnel past her jawbone and down her neck. Then his hands closed on her breasts, tighter, tighter, as if to burst them inside her blouse. He shoved her backward across the room, so that she lost her footing, fell, knocked her head against a wall. “Get the fuck into the bedroom. Fix your fucking ears. I’ll tell you when it’s time to put Miss Humpty Dumpty together again.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  Danny glowered.

  “That’s final. I won’t put her through any more of this. I can’t, I can’t.”

  The stench of him came forward, bloody naked ape. He fisted her hair, pulled her up so that her neck threatened to break. “You talk back any more and it’s no more Mister Nice Guy. I’ll hobble the fuck out of you, you hear me, I will. I’ll take a bite out of your boobs if I want, fuck your mouth if I feel the need. All’s I need is your hands whole and your head obedient. But as for the rest
of you babe, all bets are off. I own every stinking inch of you and don’t you forget it.”

  Then he was kicking her toward the bedroom door, his bare feet like workboots against her buttocks, and he took her and threw her on the bed and called Wolf in—and there she was, Wolf’s blood-slicked jaws spilling growls to keep her pinned to the bed, while through the closed door came the muffled sounds of Marcie dying all over again.

  ***

  The traffic at quarter past three surprised him. He was used to late hours at the office, preparing arguments for the following day or researching the next case. Had to remind himself that it was Friday afternoon and folks tended to wangle themselves off work early so they could beat everybody else to Tahoe.

  Karin would be there when he got home, he was sure of that. Or else a note saying where she was and when she’d be back. If need be, he’d whip something up himself for Joe and Laura, mock-scold her when she walked through the door, the three of them in the midst of their meal. Then, after the Caldones left, he would embrace her, tell her how much he loved her, how much he wanted their marriage to work. Let Malloy hang for a day, he’d get up at five and modem into LEXIS for what he needed, Karin sunk into dreamless sleep from the amazing lovemaking he’d indulge her with tonight.

  Roseville exits up ahead. A billboard yokel shouted, “Hey, Vern” for some car dealership. Maybe he should stop and pick up flowers. Right, just what she needed. But it was the gesture that mattered. He recalled bringing home roses once, not a rose in her garden and she’d never told him why. When she saw the bouquet, she freaked, wouldn’t speak to him for a day, wouldn’t tell him why, took three days of decompressing from whatever-the-hell-it-was before she was back to normal.

  She’d probably gone for a walk in the park, brought a picnic lunch and ended up staying for hours. Or maybe she had gone to the Cinedome with . . . but he couldn’t think who that might be. She had no friends except his friends. Danny’d kept her caged up, and once he was gone, she’d put most of her energy into her plants—tending as it were her own garden and shutting out all else, save what or whom he brought home.