They had gone so far as to talk about investigating the area of New Jersey he had grown up in. That scared him and plenty; God knew what they would find if they traced his cancer back to Blackswamp. But in the end they wrote it off to one of life’s mysteries, which meant that no one cared one way or another how a dying convict developed a mutating, cancerous radiological disease.
He lay on his stomach and reached into the pit, patting his hand around the edge until he located a revolver hanging by a railroad spike driven into the wall of earth.
The gun was small and dark and pitted with rust, and he stuffed it in his waistband before replacing the sheet of plywood.
Now to make up for lost time.
He put a coin in the pay phone and dialed a number.
“Radio Shack,” a man answered.
“Yeah,” he said. “Is Ricky there?”
Sykes used his thumbnail to scratch a lottery ticket, looking at a TV screen in the store window. Whoever thought of this shit was brilliant—millions of fucking dollars for scratching one lousy ticket.
“Hold on a minute,” the man said. “He’s just in the back.” A grinning Bob Barker was standing next to a woman holding a sign shaped like the state of Texas—now there was another guy who hadn’t gone anywhere in the last thirty years.
“Ricky,” a voice said.
“Yeah, it’s me. You got the stuff?”
“I got it,” the boy said.
“I’m right outside.”
Seagulls congregated in a V on the glistening pavement, the door of the Radio Shack chimed, and a gust of wind lifted tinsel off a posterboard girl inside. The acne-faced teenager whom he’d met in the video arcade off Atlantic Avenue walked out the door, looked in both directions, and headed toward him.
“Fifty bucks,” Sykes said, pushing fives and tens into the kid’s hand.
The boy looked around once more, then reached into his shirt pocket and handed Sykes a three-by-five. “It’s all there, everything you asked for. Got it right off the Internet.”
Sykes stared at the three-by-five all the way back to his trailer. She was alive! Her name was no longer Markey. He wondered what her house looked like. Did she have any money?
William and Susan Paxton, 1515 Quail Avenue, Gloucester Heights, New Jersey. The kid said it was outside Philadelphia, which meant she’d probably gone to visit her aunt and uncle after all. Probably the same day he went to jail.
He snapped a beer and used his thumb to press numbers on the phone.
“’Lo,” a boy answered.
A child?
At her age?
“Is Susan there?” he asked.
“Gram’s at work. She don’t get home till seven.”
Sykes looked up at the television: Magnum PI was dueling with his boss on a lawn overlooking a pale green ocean. “This is Mr. Higgins from the church. I had a question about food donations. You have her number there?”
The boy rattled it off.
“Thanks,” he said. Sykes dialed and tried to imagine what she would look like after all these years.
“Carmela’s,” she said.
The voice was a little deeper, a little huskier than he remembered, but only a little. “Yes,” he said, his own voice hoarse, his hand drifting to the back of his neck, feeling something old and painful at work in the pit of his stomach. He imagined her wet hair on his chest, the smell of strawberry shampoo. Everything was always strawberry with her: strawberry ice cream, strawberry lipstick, strawberry chewing gum—it was the one childish indulgence she maintained.
Would she have let her hair go gray, or would she have dyed it? he wondered.
“I was just wanting directions to your store.”
6
FRIDAY, MAY 6
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Susan Markey Paxton was going through the day’s take when her husband called for the third time.
“The kids want KFC instead of hot dogs. Do you mind stopping?”
“How much longer are they staying with us?” She pretended to whine.
“Hey, it was your idea to take them in. And wasn’t it just last year you said you wanted another one of your own?”
“I’m approaching menopause,” she said dryly. “Women say anything when they’re approaching menopause. I’ll stop on the way home, but don’t let them snack. They chomped through a week’s worth of cookies last night and didn’t eat their supper. I don’t want Lindsay thinking we fed them junk all week long.”
“When do they get back?”
“Two days, William,” she said, exasperated. “Two days. Don’t you ever commit anything to memory? Call up Greg and have him put some steaks aside.”
“It’s supposed to rain all weekend.”
“Then you’ll need to wear a hat,” she said merrily. “I want steaks and I want them on the grill the way you do them.”
“Oh, right, butter me up.”
“And keep them away from the cookies. I’ll be home soon. ’Bye, dear.”
“’Bye.”
Susan looked out over the sales floor at her newest addition to staff. The girl was seventeen going on fifty. Shakra. Who in the hell would name their daughter Shakra? She had five earrings in each ear, a pierced eyebrow, and a pierced tongue.
Shakra’s first question when Susan interviewed her was about her employee discount.
Susan would have turned her around right then and there, but Shakra was the daughter of a judge who was dating the owner, so it really wasn’t an interview as much as it was an introduction to her new employee.
“I think she’s stealing.”
“How could she be stealing?” her Irish friend asked. “The inventory is tagged, we have a camera on the registers, she can’t under-ring and she can’t void without an authorization. Look, Susan, she’s certainly not my cup of tea, but if Carmela wants her, Carmela gets her.”
Susan shook her head. “I know she’s stealing. I’d bet my life on it.”
“Then how?” The older woman sighed, pulling a scarf from the coatrack and tying it over her silver hair.
“I don’t know how, I just know it is so,” Susan said. “I know her type. I can read her like a book.” She squinted until her eyes were mere slits and pursed her lips together for effect.
The older woman laughed. “Oh, you can, can you now? And how is it you know about such things, girl?”
“Because I was just like her, Ellen.” Susan put her hands on her hips. “Actually I was worse. She’s stealing, Ellen, mark my words.”
“You were worse than our little Shakra here?”
“I even had a nickname, Ellen, and don’t ask. It wasn’t flattering.”
“Fine, catch her stealing, but do it tomorrow. Let’s get out of here and find us some warmth for the night. One more day and it’s the weekend.” She beamed. The woman grabbed her raincoat. “See you tomorrow.”
All the clerks but Melissa were gone by five. Susan locked the door, leaving the key hanging in the lock on its long wooden tag. She pulled the plug on a window display and looked outside.
The rain was coming down so hard she could barely see across the street. Commuters with umbrellas and hats pulled low on their heads dashed between the cars and the puddles. Melissa could have gone home with the others, but she liked to stay and close. She was a timid youngster who lived with her grandmother near the marketplace on Washington. Quite forgetful at times but seldom when it came to money. She loved to fold and reorganize the misplaced stock each night—a job all the other girls hated.
“Go on and get yourself out of here early for a change,” Susan said. “I’ll tidy up and pull stock for tomorrow.”
“I don’t mind,” the girl said sincerely, but Susan shook her head firmly.
“Out!”
Melissa gathered her things and went to the employees’ break room to get her raincoat. When she returned she waved and turned the key to let herself out. Susan heard the door chime tinkle as it closed.
The regis
ter tapes showed that it had been a good day. Next month they would be getting their fall stock and she’d have to flip the entire store. Another summer gone and it hadn’t even officially begun. Time waited for no one.
Susan finished tallying the tapes and wrapped them in an envelope with the cash and checks and deposited them in a drop safe. Then she walked the sales floor and started putting loose clothing back on the racks.
She was going through the sweaters on a carousel when the door tinkled open. She could hear rain slapping the sidewalk from the flooded gutters. It was a cool rain and a chill touched the back of her neck.
She was crouched over a pile of sweaters and squinting to read the size tag in her fingers. “What did you forget this time? You know you do this every night, Melissa. Maybe you should try ginkgo?”
There was no answer.
She stood and turned, sensing something was wrong.
It was the same strange man who had been in during the lunch hour, wearing a raincoat and a floppy hat pulled low over his forehead. He wasn’t the kind of man who bought presents for his wife, let alone expensive labels like Carmela’s. Susan hadn’t liked him then and she didn’t like him now.
“I’m sorry, but the store is closed,” she said firmly. She looked up at the security camera for emphasis, wishing she had taken the time to lock the door behind Melissa.
She remembered thinking this afternoon how interested he had seemed in the cameras and their locations, how he would pick things up and lay them down without really looking at them. Susan had begun following him around the store until he seemed to get annoyed and left.
“We closed at five.” She shooed him with her hands. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
The man smiled with bad teeth; a horrible scar crossed the front of his neck diagonally. An ugly brown growth protruded from behind one ear. She didn’t know him, of that there was no doubt. You didn’t forget a face like that, and yet there was something—
The man picked up a stack of sweaters lying next to him and extended them toward her, then smiled.
Suddenly she felt ill; the image of a Manson-like youth appeared before her. Two loud reports reverberated around the walls of the store.
Susan’s legs buckled and she dropped to her knees, arms still clutching the sweaters. She looked up at the man in disbelief. One bullet lodged in her back, the other passed through the soft tissue in a shoulder and continued on.
Sykes? she thought. Earl Sykes? It couldn’t be.
Sykes put the gun against her forehead and fired once more, watching her body jerk backward, then forward. The bullet mushroomed out the back of her skull.
She fell face-first into the carpet.
He pulled his hat low and turned, looking down and away from the cameras. Then he exited with the key, locking the door from the outside and joining the hundreds of other hats and umbrellas on their way home.
Carmela’s BMW was idling in front when the police arrived. It wasn’t yet daylight, but the street cleaners and trash trucks were out.
Susan’s husband had spent all of last night and the early morning hours looking for her. He’d called the Pennsylvania and the New Jersey state police to see if she had been in an accident. The Gloucester Heights police took a missing persons report and contacted state and Philadelphia city police, who checked out the store where she worked. It was dark and all looked secure.
At 3:00 A.M. a New Jersey state trooper found Susan’s car in a commuter lot near the Walt Whitman Bridge. A near-hysterical William Paxton called Carmela at home, asking her to meet the Philadelphia police and open the store so they could have a look around.
Carmela turned the key and found the light switch behind the display window. One officer went with her to check the office, and two others milled around the door uncertain what to do next. The store was quiet and everything looked in order. Cash drawers, per closing procedure, were emptied and turned on top of the machines.
Finally the senior of the two officers pointed to the back of the room. “Hey, Fresco, why don’t you go over and check out the dressing rooms.”
“Yeah, okay.” The doughy rookie waddled off with keys and cuffs jangling on his belt.
“Everything seems to be here,” Carmela told the officer. She was worried for Susan, but whatever had happened obviously hadn’t happened here. She closed the books and put them in the drawer. “Do you want me to open the safe?”
The senior officer looked across the sales floor to where Fresco was weaving his way through the clothing racks. “No, ma’am, I think we’ve seen enough.”
Just then Fresco made a grunting noise and disappeared from sight, all of his heavy equipment crashing to the floor. Then came a bloodcurdling scream.
The story would be told around precincts for all of time, becoming a legend that was embellished over the years until it was horrid beyond description. Fresco would be too traumatized to repeat it, however. He had tripped over the dead woman’s shoe and fallen face-forward in the mess that was once the back of her skull.
Detective Payne arrived at five-thirty to take charge of the scene. His hair and face were soaked; there was a cup of Seattle’s Best in one hand.
He already knew that his corpse had been contaminated, not a great career move for the rookie—dipping his face into someone else’s brains—but Fresco was gutsy enough to clean himself off and stick with the scene, so Payne patted the young officer on the shoulder as he passed. He knew plenty of other rookies who would be looking for post-trauma therapy so they could sit on their fat asses in a desk job for the next thirty years.
He listened to the briefing by the senior officer while Fresco stood by the door and logged all entries.
The mobile crime lab arrived at dawn and began their fingerprinting routine.
“Try to get that safe in the back office. I want the owner to get in there next.”
The technician nodded.
Payne walked along the back of the room and then around the body, looking at it from all angles. He knelt and took her hands, lifting each of her fingers with the tip of his pen. Then he studied what he could see of her face, lifting her hair away with the pen and feeling a pang of sorrow when he saw how pretty she had been. The head shot was pencil thick between the eyebrows and apple-size where Fresco’s face had been, but there was no slug in the wall or on the floor.
He took out his penlight and swept the carpet under the clothing racks, then crawled between them until he was at the other end of the store. Nothing.
The bullet would have been badly deformed and traveling slowly after passing through her skull. Not enough punch left for the hardwood shelving or concrete wall in the back of the room. He concentrated on the clothing racks just behind her.
There was a mist of red over a carousel of white blouses, spreading in an ever-widening cone away from the body. He followed its path to several neat stacks of oatmeal-colored turtlenecks and stood over them. He crouched and surveyed each one until at last he shone his light on the telltale gray mark on a folded edge.
He looked at it more closely from both sides and then lay on his back and looked up at it. Finally he knelt and lifted the sweater with his pen. The slug was lying between two sweaters in perfect condition. It could not have been the head shot. One of the rounds in her torso must have passed through without meeting bone or sinew.
“I’ve got a bullet,” he yelled, pointing down to the stack of sweaters. The technician who kept on dusting nodded in acknowledgment.
Payne propped the sweater up with his pen so the bullet was visible and walked to the front of the store to talk with the owner.
Once they were finally able to open the safe, Carmela found the day’s cash and credit card deposits as well as checks and voids balanced out in Susan’s handwriting. There was even a petty-cash box with three hundred dollars and a book of business checks.
In fact, the only thing that seemed to be missing was the tape from the security camera, but that turned up later in th
e pocket of a new employee’s coat. Her name was Shakra.
Of one thing he was now certain. Robbery wasn’t the motive. Whatever had happened here was personal. He needed to talk to the husband.
The phone rang, and Carmela snatched it up without thinking.
She was a handsome specimen of a woman, Payne thought, and successful, too. An article Payne had perused in some magazine mentioned that she had stores in Boca, Boston, and Washington, D.C., and was moving into the gentlemen’s market.
Carmela’s hair and makeup appeared to be perfect, even though she’d been called out in the middle of the night. She had a presence about her; it was easy to see how she connected so well to the elite.
But the beautiful face began to disintegrate when she pressed the phone to her ear. Her lips trembled, her eyes lost their luster, and her face took on that vacant look he’d seen so many times before. Payne could hear a voice calling out to her, a man’s voice on the other end of the line. “Hello…Hello…” Payne reached out and took the set from her hand and found William Paxton on the other end.
He spoke softly to the husband, telling him to put the uniformed policeman who was sitting with him on the line. He knew it was going to be a long hard day in that house and that tomorrow, when the realization set in, things would be even worse.
He spoke to the officer, then pushed the button to disconnect and dialed 911 for an ambulance. Carmela might be one cool lady in her element, but this wasn’t it. He watched her lips turn blue as he put his coat around her. Carmela was going into shock.
A collage of glossy photos thumbtacked to the wall showed people around a birthday cake; a group at a summer picnic in shorts and polo shirts; three women—one of them Carmela, another Susan—drinking champagne on a boat. It was easy to tell who Susan was in the pictures. Susan, with her bronzy complexion and big wide eyes, wore no makeup and let her hair fall straight. Even at forty-something, Susan looked happy and healthy.
But happiness was relative, and husbands and wives did run astray. Everyone had something to hide if you looked hard enough.
18 Seconds Page 8