“You need to go, Winter?”
“No. Why you ask me that?”
“Because I intend to break down this door and get on the other side. I sure do.”
“How? You friends with Batman or sumpin’?”
“Neighborhood I come from Batman stayed away.”
Xavier hefted his miniature tire iron and rubbed it thoroughly with a rag from the floor while studying the door closely.
“This ain’t no glass door, Ecks.”
“But you see, Win. The door got hinges.”
“Shit, man. Them things look like they frets on a battleship.”
“Sure do,” Xavier said with a nod. “But the outer edge is anchored in concrete, not steel. All I got to do is pull the outside of the hinges out the wall.”
“What about the locks?”
“They’re anchored in concrete too.”
It took a little under three hours, but Xavier, with some help from Winter Johnson, wrenched the hinges from their moorings and levered the five-hundred-pound door from its frame. It hit the floor with a mighty crash, but no toes were broken and the sound was swallowed by the earth.
The smells of fresh soil, with a hint of rotting flesh, wafted from the shadowy underground chamber.
The interior was dark, and Xavier hesitated to use his little flashlight.
“What’s that smell?” the professional chauffeur asked.
“Death.”
“What?”
“Listen, man,” Xavier said. “I let you come this far—to get your feet wet. I know you’re scared. You’d be a fool not to be. But maybe right now you should listen to that shiver in your heart. ’Cause you know, Win, this shit here is about to get bad.”
Winter’s eyes were light brown and small like their owner. He squinted at Xavier and his shoulders quivered.
“In for a penny,” the driver said, “in for a pound.”
This phrase was like the flip of a switch in the ex-gangster’s nervous system. The violence, as always, was most evident as a sensation in Xavier’s forearms. His jaw clenched, clamping down on the evil smile that wanted out. He turned abruptly, entering the tomblike vault, guided by the little plastic flash.
The chamber was largish, fifteen feet deep and twenty wide.
Toward the far end of the unfinished space, lying on a short mound of moist soil, was Sedra Landcombe. There was a pale blue slip over her withered flesh and a bloody gash on the left side of her head. The force of the blow had caused the eyeball on that side to come out of its socket, falling down the side of her face and hanging next to her left ear.
“Oh, shit!” Winter cried.
Xavier knelt close to the body, looking for anything that might tell her story. But she was dead and bereft of any signature, jewelry, or sigil. Probably murdered in another room, Xavier mused, most likely the master bedroom. Xavier thought that Dodo had hit her aunt with the bludgeon, maybe more than once, dragged her down to the family tomb, and then gone back upstairs to wash up any blood.
“Oh, fuck, no,” Winter whined.
He was standing at the door holding a small dark and lightweight stone in his hand.
“No,” he moaned.
“What is it?”
“A baby’s skull, man. A baby’s little head.”
Winter dropped the stone and fell to his knees.
Xavier went to the area of the tomb that his friend had come from and saw various bones both jumbled and arranged. Most remnants belonged to children and babies, but there were at least three adult skulls in the mix. Xavier poked at the bones with his tire iron but he didn’t touch them, not even with gloves on.
The bruise on his side, from the car accident, suddenly flared. This was the only indication he had of some kind of feeling of vulnerability. His minister had sent him into slaughter and he, in turn, had brought along an innocent friend.
“What we gonna do, Ecks?”
“We get our ass outta here, Win.”
At the top of the stairs, still in the pantry that contained the door leading to the basement, Xavier had a premonition. There was something wrong—a feeling on the air.
“Ecks—” Winter began.
Rule put up a hand and moved in front of his friend. With a further gesture of the same hand he imparted that the driver should stay where he was.
The pain in his side disappeared as Xavier Rule, aka Egbert Noland, moved quietly through the kitchen and into the living room.
The two men wore dark clothes. One was white and the other, an ecru-colored man, probably hailed from below the southern border; either he did or his ancestors had.
Xavier surprised them. They were carrying large duffel bags and weren’t expecting to come across anyone. But these men were professionals and so they dropped their bags and reached for things inside their clothes.
The violence in Xavier’s forearms went into action without volition. With his left hand he threw the crowbar like an underhand javelin, and before it had punctured the white man’s chest he was firing with the specially made Afghani pistol. The gun made little noise and no flash. Both men fell to the ground, decimated by the ambidextrous stone-cold killer.
“What happened?” Winter said. He ran into the room upon hearing the coughing of the whispering gun.
Xavier hurried to the men he’d defeated. The white man had managed to get a pistol in his hand, but Xavier slapped it away. The other man had four bullets in him, head and chest.
“Stay back!” Xavier said to Winter. “Don’t let him see you.”
Then the church deacon searched the bodies and bags of his sudden enemies. The duffel bags contained shovels and spades, kerosene and a black plastic body bag. The Hispanic man had two keys in his pocket, held together by a piece of string. Xavier would have bet that they were a fit for the front door and the underground tomb. The white man had a money clip in his pants pocket. There were a few bills and a slip of paper held fast by the silver clamp.
“Help me,” the white man wheezed.
Xavier might have considered killing him if Winter were not a witness.
“I’m dying,” the man with the crowbar protruding from the middle of his chest said.
Xavier searched the man’s pockets, found nothing but a cheap cell phone. He stood up, watched closely by the dying white man, turned his back, and went to the kitchen.
“We’re going to leave now,” he said to his shivering friend. “When we go through the living room keep your back to the one still alive. Don’t turn to look, and keep your hand up over your face so he don’t see you in any glass.”
On the way to the street Xavier told his friend to meet him at an all-night club on Pico west of Sepulveda.
“It’s behind the taco stand in the little minimall on the northwest side of the street. You don’t have to knock. Somebody’ll come out to meet you. Tell him you there for Ecks and he’ll let you in.”
Xavier drove in the opposite direction from his friend. A block away he entered a call on the phone he lifted from the dying man. The call was answered almost immediately by Clyde Pewtersworth.
“Church services.”
“Don’t you sleep, Clyde?”
“I try.”
“Connect me to Soto.”
There were three clicks, a spate of silence, and then a phone ringing. There were at least a dozen rings before a groggy voice answered, “Que?”
“That house? The one they saw me coming from? It’s a killing field, but one of the bodies is still breathing.”
Xavier disconnected the call and threw the phone from the car window. Then he did a U-turn in the middle of the street and drove his Edsel toward the no-name, after-hours nightclub.
On the way, following the speed limit like a teenager taking his first driving test, he remembered:
Swan was tall and hefty, not nearly as black as Ecks. He got in a fight over a woman outside the Chilean’s Bar on East 143rd and then got carried away. His opponent died when Swan twisted his neck after knocking him
unconscious. The police had no choice but to put him under arrest. Swan got word to Betty Rynn that a young churchgoer, George Napier, had witnessed the slaughter and offered to bear witness in the trial. Everybody else at the Chilean’s knew better than to have seen anything. But George put his faith in God, and Betty told Ecks to have a talk with the young man.
No one was supposed to know that George was a state witness. No one would have if it weren’t for one of Swan’s relatives who worked for the district attorney’s office.
Napier had a girlfriend named Lena. He was in the habit of spending time with her at her parents’ house off Flatbush in Brooklyn.
Ecks meant to talk to the young man, to scare him. He wanted to show him that he would never be safe or secret again. Maybe if Lena’s kisses weren’t so sweet and George had left at ten instead of twelve forty-five, maybe then Ecks wouldn’t have had time to think and the opportunity to kill rather than scare.
Those hours he spent waiting in the shadows he worried that the young zealot might get stupid and try to implicate him too. There was no one on the street or sidewalk when George came strolling out. He walked right past Xavier’s hidey-hole. His eye came out of its socket too. He died and Xavier went to fuck Betty Rynn, Swan’s girlfriend, as payment for getting her man out of a jam.
“You give me this right here,” Ecks told Betty, “and I promise your old man be outta jail by the end of the week.”
She gave it to him good. So much so that he suspected she liked him more than she ever let on.
Ecks parked down the block from the nameless West Los Angeles minimall. The street was empty and his suit barely soiled. He had almost been murdered, struck down by a moving car, killed one man, and maybe another. There was a witness who knew his name, his address. He was three years out from the rat-infested harbor that had been his life but now he could see his past looming on the horizon—and there were sinister shadows moving along the shore.
Shirley’s Den was a pink stucco bunker hidden by buildings on all sides. It had a drab green door, no windows, and no external lights. Regulars knew to stand at the door and wait. Newcomers were met by a man whom Xavier knew only as Sentry. Sentry was a big brown man who asked strangers what they were doing on his property. He stayed in a side shack monitoring the door, opening it for regulars and their guests—shooing away the rest.
Sentry opened the door for Ecks and he walked through wondering what he should do next. He had money and a fake passport. He knew some Spanish and had connections in Cartagena, Colombia.
Shirley’s Den was a large room, bright and tinted green. There were fifteen triangular shiny red tables and a large gray-and-green marble bar. Jazz, always jazz—representing every decade and style—played on the lifelike-sounding speakers. That night it was Sidney Bechet barking out “Bechet’s Fantasy,” giving Louis Armstrong a run for his money, if not his genius.
There were maybe a dozen customers in twos and threes scattered about the emerald-and-scarlet room. Winter Johnson was sitting in a corner looking like a rich man’s dog left out in the cold for the first time in his pampered life.
“Hello, Ecks,” a woman said. She was half the way through her forty-first year, auburn haired, plain faced and yet somehow provocative.
Shirley Henn was from Montreal originally. At the age of seventeen she met a French Canadian named Robert, who spelled his name phonetically—Robair. Robair and Shirley spent six weeks touring the American South, robbing pawnshops, banks, convenience stores, and anyplace else that could stack two dollar bills together. They killed nine people. They did. Shirley had been initiated in weapons, liquor, and sex by her adoptive stepfather—Jacques “Jack” Henn. She fired as many shots as Robair did and was probably a bit more accurate.
Shirley loved Robair like moths loved flame. She clung to his skinny side and often shivered when he said her name. That six weeks felt as if it were an entire lifetime.
Shirley and Robair began to have differences when they invaded an upscale cabin in the Tennessee woods where a wealthy Houston family took their summer vacations. She didn’t mind when they shot the father or even when Robair forced the mother and teenage daughter to do a striptease before killing them. It was when Robair got into the family liquor cabinet and decided to take the four-year-old son in the backyard to use for target practice that Shirley spoke up.
“Don’t do that, Robert,” she’d said. Even then she realized, when calling him Robert, that the love affair had foundered.
They were standing on the back porch of the summer home. Arabella Marquette and her daughter, Fawn, lay naked and dead in the kitchen just behind them. The acned, twenty-one-year-old Robair gave Shirley a petulant frown as he simultaneously shot the little boy at his side.
Shirley raised her own pistol and shot her man in the center of his forehead. His lips formed a tight O. He didn’t lose his footing until he was already dead.
The weight of that condensed six-week lifetime settled on Shirley and she found in her heart that she could not deny one thing that she had done or that had been done to her.
“I sit in my home,” she said in an Expressions session that Xavier had attended, “and think about going back to Montreal and killing my stepfather. He’s old now and living in a retirement home. I’ve bought six tickets over the years. But every time I think about going I remember that look on Robair’s face when I shot him. He’d only talked big before he met me. He wanted to be evil but I was the one who allowed him to, who empowered him. And when I killed him there was no relief—not in me and not in the world we scarred.”
“Hey, Shirley,” Xavier said. “How you doin’, honey? Gettin’ any sleep?”
“I have a new barmaid,” Shirley said. “She’s not gay and neither am I.”
“Yeah? You don’t say.”
“But I told her about my sleep problems and she offered to lie in the bed with me, next to me. She’s a runaway and many times she goes out with her boyfriends. But on those nights she lies there by me I sleep like I did when I was child before my mother remarried.”
Xavier heard the words and the echoes they set off in the spree killer’s heart. He knew not to comment on her therapy and so said, “Thanks for lettin’ my friend in.”
“He looks scared.”
“He should.”
When Xavier pulled out the green straight-backed chair at Winter’s table the young man leaped to his feet.
“Just me,” Xavier said.
The words did not seem to have a calming effect on the youth, but he did sit down again.
“What we gonna do, Ecks?”
Xavier was a practiced killer but he rarely planned his crimes. He killed when he had to or when the opportunity arose and it seemed like the proper move.
At one time he would have probably killed Winter. It just made sense to tie up loose ends.
“That’s up to you, Win,” he said.
“Me?”
“Those men had guns, son. They would have killed us both and then burned the house down around our bodies. The way I see it, it was self-defense plain and simple. But the law could have different ideas. And I got a history, so they might not bring me down on this, but there are other warrants, in other places.”
“What about that man with the tire iron in his chest?”
“I used his phone to call the cops. They might get there in time to save him.”
Winter clasped his hands and then ripped them apart.
“What should I do?” he pleaded.
“If the guilt is too much for you, you can call the cops. Tell ’em that I made you come with me and that you waited to tell them because you were afraid I’d kill you. Give me a heads-up and I’ll be gone before they get to my door.”
“I can’t just turn you in like that, Ecks.”
“Maybe not, but if somebody saw your license plate or something, and the cops come up on you, then tell ’em that you drove me to my car, that I forced you. Don’t lie for me but for yourself, kid. Understand?”
“What was goin’ on in there?” Winter asked then.
“I’m on a job,” the Parishioner said. “I’m looking for three boys went missing twenty-three years ago.”
“You think that was them in the basement?”
“Maybe so. Maybe. I got a lead or two and so I’ll see. But right now you order a few shots of cognac and drink ’em down. After that I’ll give you a ride home and you sleep on what you should do.”
After dropping an inebriated and distraught Winter Johnson at his apartment on Crest Drive, Xavier drove down to the beach using surface streets.
On the way he took out his cell phone and entered a number.
“Yeah?” a gravelly voice answered midway through the second ring.
“I need you to take my route for the rest of the week, Bud,” Xavier said.
“Starting when?”
“In the morning.”
“Okay,” the voice said. “You all right?”
“Canned peaches and sour cream.”
At the ocean he veered right, heading up the Pacific Coast Highway. A twenty-four-hour jazz station was playing early Thelonius Monk for no particular reason. The complex rhythms reminded the killer of his late-night Harlem apartment home after the beatings and turmoil subsided, when peace reigned in the living room and the record player cooed with trumpets, saxophones, and piano. His mother had cried herself to sleep by then and the old man was passed out, or nearly so. Xavier would sit in the doorway to the bedroom he shared with his brother and cousin, listening to the music and the silence.
It was a quarter to three in the morning and the road was fairly empty. His forearms no longer ached for violence.
Ecks is an ambidextrous mothahfuckah. He can kill a man with either hand, mocha-colored Swan used to say about his friend. He’s the Sugar Ray Robinson of the street.
He’d never counted the number of lives he’d taken until Father Frank had him confess at Expressions: twenty-two if the white man died, twenty-nine if you held him accountable for the times he’d been an accomplice.
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