by Brian Hodge
Then she gets the most bizarre expression on her face — a mixture of sadness, frustration, and exhaustion.
Kilgallon cannot move. Crouched in the shadows behind the garbage barrel, blood vibrating with terror, bent legs numb with pain, he remembers where he saw her last. A videotape flickering in the dust motes of Lieutenant Withers’ office. A series of interviews conducted by task force people. Earlier in the year, the Feds had narrowed the list of suspects in the Red River killings down to one: A thirty-three year old, white, unemployed welder named Tommy Earl Spence. Spence had disappeared six months ago, but the Feds had managed to dig up the boy’s mother, dragging her down to the local precinct house for questioning. The little pug-nosed gal had sat sphinx-like in the fluorescent gaze of her interrogators, grunting mono-syllabic answers, sucking on a Viceroy. Her weathered face had betrayed nothing. It was like questioning a cinder block.
Now: Tonight: This very instant: That same pug-nosed woman is standing in the middle of the murder scene.
Tommy Earl Spence’s mother.
Kilgallon watches in awe as the woman sets her potted tree on the floor. She sighs. She doesn’t seem especially horrified, or repulsed, or even shaken. Just sad and frustrated. And weary. And the more Kilgallon stares, the more he realizes that the potted tree is not a potted tree at all. It is a large, brown, plastic bucket filled with a mop, a broom, a squeegee, and cleaning supplies. And the more Kilgallon watches, the more he realizes that Tommy Earl Spence’s mother did not come here tonight to plant a tree or even consult with a friend on the proper amount of nitrogen additives to use in her mulch.
She came here for another purpose altogether.
She came here to clean up the mess.
Kilgallon gawks at her.
The pug-faced woman opens a plastic garbage bag, then begins whisking up all the fallen items into a dust pan and emptying them into the bag. She turns her attention to the fallen chairs, turning them upright and tucking them into their proper places. She sweeps up the debris and discards it. Then she tends to the body. Kilgallon feels his head buzzing with wasps, his stomach twisting. It doesn’t matter that this insane lady is ruining his scene. What matters is that Kilgallon cannot move. He cannot budge. His numbed, bent legs are cast in granite. He is watching the final fragment of the puzzle-box clicking into place, the origins of the Red River’s signature — the freshly scrubbed surfaces, the faint residue of cleaning fluid, the blood-soaked refuse neatly bagged and stacked near the door — and all Kilgallon can do is huddle in the shadows as still as a stone behind the garbage barrel.
Look at you! You worthless man! What a hideous excuse for a son!
Kilgallon silently cringes at the voice in his brain, but he keeps watching.
He cannot stop watching.
He cannot stop.
The lady is moving the corpse now, grunting at the unexpected weight, dragging blood-slick boot-heels across the linoleum to the opposite side of the room. She sits the corpse upright against the baseboard like a doll, then wipes the blood residue from its purple-veined alabaster flesh with moist towelettes. She even pulls a small skein of thread from the sleeve of her sweater and does a quick patch job on the torn shirt. Kilgallon is entranced, frozen with dread.
Then the woman tackles the blood.
Kilgallon starts to panic because the woman is on her hands and knees now, scrubbing the tile near the foot of the bed, scrubbing a sticky constellation of blood droplets, and her right knee is only centimeters away from Kilgallon’s notebook. Kilgallon wills his hand to move. Slowly. Inside his suit coat, around the beavertail grip of his Ruger Speed-Six. He slowly pulls the gun from its holster and takes a deep, silent breath. He can’t understand what’s happening to him. He doesn’t want to aim his gun at the woman. He doesn’t even want to move. He cannot tear his gaze from her busy routine. So meticulous.
So protective.
At last, the lady finishes scrubbing all the trouble areas, paying little attention to the notebook, and finally rises to her feet. She carries the bucket over to the sink, rinses the scrub brush and runs water into the bucket. Kilgallon watches as she starts mopping. She mops with extra care and precision, mopping the pooled blood from the tiles, the spatters from the walls, the smudges from the baseboards, the stains from the front of the refrigerator, even the droplets under the bed. Then she empties the mop water, sets the bucket down and walks over to the notebook.
Kilgallon’s blood freezes in his veins.
It happens so quickly, so nonchalantly, that Kilgallon barely has a chance to suck in a breath. The lady bends down, snatches up the notebook, then carries it over to the garbage barrel— the same garbage barrel behind which Kilgallon now cowers, bug-eyed, paralyzed, breath frozen in his lungs. The two strangers are close enough to smell each other’s breath now, but the odd angle of the light and the overflowing trash bin block the old woman’s view.
She tosses the notebook into the trash.
Their eyes meet.
Kilgallon springs to his feet, his gun coming up involuntarily. “Stinson City Police —!”
“Oh —” the woman starts with a jerk, her hand shielding her face.
“— don’t —”
“— oh my —”
“— don’t move —” Kilgallon’s Ruger is vibrating softly in his trembling hands.
“Please,” the woman says with a shudder, her feral eyes averted, gazing down at the scrubbed tiles. “I didn’t mean to upset any —”
“Mrs. Spence?” Kilgallon’s heart is thumping in his neck, in his ears.
The woman looks up, fixing her icy blue eyes on him, her expression changing like clay hardening in time-lapse. The lines around her eyes deepen, her lips stretching thin and bloodless. She realizes that Kilgallon is one of the hunters, one of the stalkers stalking her son. Her entire posture changes, her back straightens, her chin juts heroically. She looks him square in the eyes. “You know I did this, don’t you,” she murmurs softly. “I did this terrible thing.”
“Mrs. Spence —”
“It was me,” she says a tad more forcefully. Lying through her clenched teeth.
“Alright, Mrs. Spence —”
“All of it, all of it.”
“I understand —”
“Me —”
“Alright —” Kilgallon tries to swallow but his throat is seizing up, his stomach ratcheting tighter and tighter. He can see the woman’s hands pulling in tight against her paunchy belly, her fingers pink and psoriatic from decades of dishwashing. Something inside Kilgallon is breaking, a hairline fracture fissuring, cracking open. His eyes are welling up, and he has to blink to see through the tears.
The woman is wringing her hands now. “Such a terrible thing I’ve done… “
There is a long, agonizing pause.
“Go,” Kilgallon murmurs, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible.
The woman looks up at him, alarmed at first, then confused, frightened.
“Go, now,” Kilgallon says softly. He puts his gun back in its holster.
“But —”
“GO!”
The woman starts backing toward the door, her gaze still locked onto Kilgallon, her lips moving slightly, no words coming out. She slowly grabs her bucket, her mops, her dust pan, then pauses to scoop up her brush — all the while keeping her eyes on Kilgallon. When she finally reaches the front door, she pauses. Bites her lip. Blinks. And for a moment it looks as though she might say something else, but instead she kneels down and wipes a stray droplet of blood with her sleeve.
Kilgallon closes his eyes, bracing himself against the wave of emotion pouring over him.
And when he opens his eyes, the stocky little woman has vanished.
Kilgallon walks over to the front door, gazes through the dirty screen.
Outside the cabin, the night is turning brilliant, almost Day-Glo bright, the trees like black licorice lace against a deep purple sky, the high tension wires like dark angel hair threading thr
ough the clouds. And a squat little woman waddling off into the vibrant darkness with her bucket of cleaning products, an exotic bird.
An endangered species.
Vanishing over the horizon.
Into a land where messy rooms are always straightened, and problems are swept under the rug like so much dust, and mothers love their sons madly, unconditionally.
A land of make believe.
SOMEBODY DOWN HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU
It’s getting late, and the shadows are stretching across the bayou, making the little derelict marina look like a graveyard of torn sails and leaning masts swaying in the fishy breeze. The light’s different down there below Lake Pontchartrain. That’s something I noticed that first night. We got down there about supper time, the kid and I, and the cicadas or the crickets or the frogs — or whatever they got down there in that hot box in the dead of summer — they’re like the roar of jet engines in my skull. And the heat’s pressing down on us, and our shirts are sticking to our backs from driving all day in that beat-up Jimmy, and I notice everything looks fuzzy and green. Like the sun’s drooped behind a pane of insulator glass on the horizon.
“So we don’t need a license or anything to go out in this crate?” I ask the old cracker who runs the boat rental place.
His rotten smile widens, his green teeth gleaming in the dusky Louisiana light. “Naw… not unless y’all run into the coast guard.”
Then he laughs his phlegmy laugh like a raccoon snorting coke, gesturing down at the cockpit of that rusty bucket of bolts tide to the dock. It’s an old Sea Ray diesel pocked with salt sores and a ragged canvas bonnet stretched like a sagging skin across its cabin — a veteran of drug runs and countless illegals rafting out of Mariel, Cuba. I don’t know squat about boats. Or the sea. I’m from Chicago, for Christ’s sake. Water’s for chasing Bushmills and flushing turds. But the thing looks simple enough. A few gauges, a steering wheel, and a couple pairs of stick-shift levers.
“Two bills gets y’all twenty-four hours,” he says, “no questions asked.”
I look over at Billy. A skinny bundle of bones and zits, draped in an oversized denim shirt with the sleeves fringed off, he’s looking down at the GPS receiver with a nervous expression on his ferrety little face. It’s gripped in his sweaty palm like a transistor radio, and I can tell when the kid looks up at me that the Freak’s moving. We’re running out of time. “Uncle Dan, um, we need to, like, make a decision,” he says.
I tell him to take it easy. I tell him I got it under control.
He’s my cousin Matt’s boy — maybe the closest thing to family I ever had. I use him now and again in my skip-trace business, usually as a spotter, or a driver, or whatever. I guess he thinks it’s pretty jake having a bounty hunter as an uncle. But this trip is different. We’re down here to kill somebody — a first for me — and I still don’t like the fact that I brought him along. It’s bad enough I expose the boy to the scum-bag bail-bond jumpers I gotta track down.
But now this.
“So uh… fellas… what’s the deal?” Mr. Green Teeth pipes up suddenly, and I let out a sigh and offer him a hundred and fifty for the night. He snatches the wad of bills out of my hand with a grumble, then hobbles away toward his tar paper shack at the end of the dock.
We throw the duffel bag in the rear of the cabin, then climb on board the bucket of bolts. The boat pitches like a carnival ride as I thumb the motor on. A gurgling noise, and a fart of exhaust, and then we’re surging out of there, the Spanish moss clawing at us like an endless, broken-down car wash as we churn through the soup toward the mouth of the bay. The air smells of rotten eggs.
It takes us maybe fifteen minutes to reach the gulf, and by that time the kid is crawling out of his skin with nervous tension. I tell him to relax. I assure him that the little green dot on that GPS receiver is accurate — I had the kid’s mom hide the little pellet of a transmitter inside the Freak’s cell phone a week ago — and now all we have to do is close the distance. We won’t even have to board the Freak’s boat. Just get close enough to get his attention.
Get a clean shot, and we’re outta there.
By that point it’s already as dark as a stew pot out there, and as we emerge into the open sea, the air changes. I goose the motor a little, and the slimy, sulfurous breeze envelopes us. The sky over the Gulf is frigging huge. I’m not used to seeing all those stars. Where I come from the sky’s usually so low and grey you can reach up and scrape your fingertips across it. But this is insane. It’s like we just slid out over the edge of the universe.
“The fuck’s he doing out there?” Billy hollers over the bellow of the engine, gripping the side of the rocking boat with his free hand, his eyes glittering in the darkness. According to the two little glowing dots on the GPS we’re now less than a mile from the Freak’s boat, but we still can’t see anything out there other than a sheet of black glass stippled with yellow moonlight. I start to wonder if the directions the boy’s mother gave me are messed up. Maybe we got the wrong coastline.
“Don’t get your piles in an uproar, kid. I told you I got it under —”
The words stick in my throat suddenly.
The first glimpse of the Freak’s boat materializes like the tip of a cigarette on the horizon. He’s not moving. I yank back on the throttle, and the nose of the Sea Ray sinks, the wake goosing us from behind as we slow down. The kid doesn’t say a word when I take the GPS from him and toss it to the deck. “Get the duffel bag.”
He goes down below, gets the bag, brings it back up, and I fish around for the Smith & Wesson. It’s a chrome .357 I bought off a skel on the street, filed clean, with a red laser sighting device. This is going to be easy, I’m thinking. Right now, I’m thinking this is going to be a piece of cake.
Of course, at that point I had no idea what was about to happen.
Let me take a minute to tell you about the Freak, and why I agreed to resort to murder in order to rid the world of this prick. His real name is Bernard Pryce, and with a name like ‘Bernard’ it’s no wonder he turned out to have issues.
Anyway: Here’s how he got his claws into the kid’s family. My cousin Ginny — the kid’s mom — she had a tough time after the divorce. She couldn’t find work, and half of Matt’s income as a pipe fitter didn’t help much, so she started flirting with what she insisted on calling ‘the exotic dancing field.’ Brothers and sisters, let me tell you: I like a good table dance as much as the next guy, but working as a dancer in a strip club is about as safe and secure as being a god damned mine sweeper. All manner of scum passes through those places, and when Bernard Pryce showed up one night, he set his sights on Ginny.
At first, I guess, she was swept off her feet: this tall, blonde dude with the fake British accent, and this mysterious business that he’s got that takes him to far flung places like Indonesia, the Middle East, and South America. But after a few months of dating the guy, he starts playing rough. Worse than that, Ginny starts stumbling on little clues that he’s into some freaky shit. Satanic cult type stuff. A desecrated cross in a drawer, a little vial of blood in the guy’s coat pocket — stuff like that. And their sex is getting weird: he wants to tie her up, choke her, drink blood with her, and finally he takes her to this sex club where they’re sacrificing a goat or some shit like that.
Ginny decides she’s had enough, and she bails. And that’s when things really get scary. Bernard comes over one night and beats the shit out of her, and then he ties her up and starts videotaping himself torturing her. He probably would have killed her if the kid hadn’t come home. Billy tries to intervene and The Freak does a number on the kid. Beats the tar out of him and then rapes him in front of his mother.
Next day, Ginny goes to the cops, and the Freak shows up with a high-powered lawyer, and the whole thing becomes a he-said/she-said circle jerk.
Now by this point, the kid wants to kill him, and Ginny just wants to move away. In fact, she did put her place on the market. But before she could sell th
e house, she ran across a stash of videos that the Freak had left there. I never saw the tapes. Ginny burned them. But she swears to this day they were the real thing. Honest-to-goodness snuff films. Devil worship stuff. Horrible shit.
That’s when she called me. I guess she figured if I didn’t kill the guy, her son probably would. And she knew I ran in some petty unsavory circles. Which is kind of funny. Because even though I’ve dwelled in the asshole of the world for most of my working life, I have this thing about sin. I was raised Catholic for a while — before my drunkard of a daddy skipped town — and I guess the old catechism just clung to me like a bad knee or an allergy you can’t shake. Killing is a mortal sin. Thou shalt not do it. Under any circumstances. I’ve had opportunities. It would be easy for a guy like me. So god damn easy. But then I’d be lost.
Lost.
Maybe that’s why I’m sweating bullets that night as we float through the darkness toward that idling speedboat. I’m checking the Smith & Wesson’s chamber, snapping it shut with greasy fingers. The Sea Ray’s rocking, and my hands are shaking, and I can now see the Freak’s boat out there maybe a couple hundred yards away.
It sits there like a black, gleaming coffin, its running light like the smoldering tip of a cigar, twinkling in the sultry salt air. I’m not sure about the distance. Your eyes play tricks on you when it’s that dark, and the adrenaline’s pumping.
“C’mon, let’s do it, c’mon, c’mon,” the kid’s murmuring behind me.
“Go down below.”
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” Billy’s backing into the shadows of the cabin like a character in some silent horror movie, and the low, strangled, flaky sound of his voice gives me the jeebies. I glance over my shoulder and all I can see is the half moon glow of the kid’s pale face hovering in the darkness underneath that parchment bonnet. “C’mon, c’mon, do it… do it, do it, do it, do it!”
By now we’re less than a hundred yards away from the Freak’s boat, and in the moonlight I can make out the long, pointed prow like the snout of an animal bobbing in the currents. The moonlight gleams off the windshield. Something glows orange within the hold of the boat. The Freak must have dropped anchor because the craft is staying in one place but the optical illusion of white caps pushing across its keel make it look like it’s inching backwards across the black void. Like a dream. Or a nightmare, I guess.