by Mike Markel
The Rev shifted, and I could see an arm. A sport jacket or suit, dark blue or black. A crisp white shirt cuff. Definitely not Fat Ricky or Alice. The two men kept talking, me thinking, Down in front. Finally, finally, the guy in the suit stepped up to the window, like he was looking right at me. Now his hands were in his pockets. It was a black suit, nice white shirt, no tie, thick chest hair visible at the open collar. Hair black as night, curly. Full beard, black with some red flecks. He didn’t smile, so I couldn’t see his pearlies. But there was no doubt about it. The Reverend Christopher Barry was hosting Agent Nick Corelli of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
There’s not too much I’m sure of these days, but I was reasonably certain that this was not a positive development.
Chapter 19
You wouldn’t think I was ever interested in math, but I did like algebra. I wasn’t very good at it, but it made sense to me. Give me a formula like x + 4 = 7, and thirty seconds later I could tell you x was 3. What I found out as I got older, however, was that life rarely presented any problems like that. Almost always, life gave me x + y = 7. I don’t know what that kind of equation is called (besides, of course, a real son of a bitch), but I know I can’t solve it.
That’s what I had here: a real son of a bitch. Too many unknown variables. Start with Nick Corelli. He told us he was FBI, consulting with Rawlings Police Department, and Chief Robert Murtaugh seemed to agree with him. But I’d spent a total of an hour and a half with the chief, an hour with Corelli, so neither of them qualified as my best buds. On the other hand, I’d never worked under the new chief before, and he seemed pretty anal about procedures. You’d think letting a Nazi impersonate an FBI agent would count as an “unacceptable deviation” at least as bad as me letting the killer do a swan dive off a cliff in the Hagerty case.
The night I’d spent looking at the sewer runoff on YouTube, a healthy percentage of the people who hated Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, Mexicans—hated anyone who wasn’t what they themselves were—were white cops. I don’t remember seeing anyone as well dressed as Nick, with his suit and his button-down shirt and tie, but there were one or two sheriffs and other big wheels who weren’t hayseeds. Wearing a nice suit didn’t mean you weren’t a moron. That I knew well, from life in general and my dating habits in particular.
Maybe Corelli was exactly who the chief said he was, and the chief was just better at doing things by the book than the old chief was. But if Corelli was legit, I had some questions for him. One would be, What happened to Professor Willson Fredericks: natural causes, homicide, suicide? And why was Ryan stonewalling me about it? Another question would be—and I understand he might not want to answer this one, but I’m curious, nonetheless—what the hell is he doing out here inside the fence at Nazi Central, standing in the living room chatting with the Reverend Christopher Barry?
Are you inside the fence, Nick?
My first instinct was to call Ryan, who’d never let me down. When we worked the Hagerty case six months ago, he was one-hundred percent solid. He had great instincts. He knew when to hang back if I was doing a line of questioning that was working. And when to jump in when he saw something that I hadn’t seen. I trusted him completely. Fast forward six months. He seemed like exactly the same guy, completely stand up.
But one thing Ryan said might be important: how he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his job. After all, Ryan had, like, 1.8 kids already and definite plans for a bunch more. If Ryan was holding back with me, maybe that’s what he was told to do by Nick or the chief. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was drinking the Kool-Aid. It might just mean he was trying to stay on the job.
If Ryan knew I was out here and in some danger but decided not to commit any unacceptable deviations from regulations to save my sorry ass—well, that would tell me something useful about where his head and his heart were. But I hadn’t given him a chance. I never told him where I was headed before I left. Never told him where I was when I called him earlier today. I’d just told him I was sick. Even if he’d stopped by my house and knocked on the door, he’d probably assume I’d just run out to the drugstore.
I wanted more than anything to call him right now. But I had no way of knowing whose team he was on. Couldn’t be sure who’d be listening if I called him now. I get Ryan on the phone, Nick Corelli could have a half-dozen buddies nearby who’d pick me up in five minutes. Game over.
No, I’d come out here on my own to do a job, and I’d live or die on my own.
I picked up my binocs again to look in on the white house. The kitchen was dark. The bedroom had a light on. Nick and the Rev were still talking in the living room. They were in profile now. Barry was talking, jabbing his finger toward Corelli to make a point. Corelli was nodding, his palms out in front of him like he understood what Barry was saying and wouldn’t do anything to piss off the Rev. Finally, Barry put his jab finger down and nodded. Corelli put out his hand. They shook, the four-handed shake complete with left-handed bicep grab. It wasn’t a hug and backslap between old buddies who went way back. It was more like they were working on an op together, and they’d set up this meet to review what had already gone down—and plot out what they were going to do next.
It was that plot-out part that was scaring me most. I didn’t know what was going on, but I sure didn’t like it. In terms of algebra, the formula I had to solve was x + y + z = I am totally screwed.
* * * *
I was nowhere near sleeping. I packed up all my stuff in my backpack. Everything except the binocs, because I figured I might want to check in occasionally on the doings at the white house. I’d want to know if Nick was there alone for a sleepover, or if members of the Rawlings Police Department were also going to stop by. The house itself was too small for a big party, but there was space enough within the compound for the whole Rawlings force—all the detectives, the unis, the clerks, all their spouses and significant others, everyone.
I thought about my options. I could hoist my backpack onto my shoulders and just walk north, straight on up to the abandoned logging road, hang a left, and make it back to my car. I’d need three hours. Even with my rubber legs and my blister and tail end of my dinner nearing my own tail end, I’d be able to make it. I could get back on 53, just head west toward north Idaho. No need to even go back home.
What did I have back there? A crappy job that I was going to lose any day now, if I hadn’t lost it already. A crappy house that was all the bank’s money because I’d re-mortgaged it a few months ago for the cash to sustain my glam lifestyle of throwing up, passing out, and screwing creeps. A crappy ex-husband who’d traded me in for a newer model year with fewer miles. And let’s not forget my sulking, sullen, miserable teenage son, whose idea of close human contact was to play war games with other dweebs on the Internet. No, let’s not forget Tommy, who never tired of showing me how bitterly I had disappointed him in so many ways. My beautiful little boy, who would be horrified if I told him that he’d disappointed me in a way or two.
I could just head west. Start over. New name, new identity, new job. Welcome to Wal-Mart. That wouldn’t be so bad, of course. Nobody to fire me, nobody to lie to me, nobody to expect anything of me. A new life for which I was totally qualified. Except for the possible downsides of having my liver explode or get killed in a DUI or be knifed or strangled by an adulterous psychopath who was okay with fucking me but then felt guilty so he needed to make it all disappear—except for those possibilities, it wouldn’t be all that bad a life.
And maybe one more except-for: putting Rawlings in my rearview mirror wouldn’t do much to get the guy who raped Dolores Weston and bashed her head in.
I pulled the Mylar blanket up over my shoulders, hugging my knees to try to stay warm, even though I felt oh so cold. I sat there behind my big rock, out of sight. The bright lights from behind me kept blazing, but I faced north, looking into the black night. Chip and Dale and the other local mammals started to come to life nearby now that I had stopped moving. I heard all ki
nds of chirping and scratching and rustling of leaves. A couple owls started in hooting, one to the west and one to the east. All the animals going about their business, leaving me alone.
I was getting drowsy, so I decided to take one more look at the house.
It was completely dark, and Nick’s car was gone. The two guards in the guard towers were guarding. Nothing to report, sir.
I pulled my knapsack up under my head for a pillow, wrapped my blanket around me, and lay down to drift away. I passed through my light dreams into my full REM dream state. All of a sudden, my eyes opened as I heard heavy steps shuffling through the leaves. I sat up. There was Fat Ricky, shaking his head like now he was going to have to do something he didn’t want to have to do. My head still full of sleep, I couldn’t think fast enough to say something. Then I felt a blow to the back of my head that sent blue sparks screaming up and down my spine.
* * * *
I started to regain consciousness, a burning pain radiating from the base of my skull. I was lying on my side, my hands and feet tied tight behind me with rope, the coarse hemp tearing into my wrists. I tried to move, to test the strength of the ropes, but was stopped by a sharp, stabbing pain coming from the right side of my ribcage, where I assume they’d kicked me a few times. At least one of my ribs felt cracked. I was blindfolded. The cloth smelled of engine grease, with a whiff of gasoline.
I tried to open my eyes, the lids struggling against the fabric of the blindfold. It was a cloth bandanna, folded over several times. I didn’t know where I was. A bare bulb from a ceiling fixture looked like a Ping-Pong ball through the blindfold. I couldn’t make out anything else. The air smelled heavy and damp, like an unventilated attic.
Assuming I was still in the compound, I was either in the Rev’s white house or in his log-cabin church. I could feel a bare cement floor, rough textured. I shivered from the cold. My head and ribcage ached. I tried to think back to what had happened, but I couldn’t remember anything other than looking at the white house through my binoculars.
Although I’d had a couple of rough sessions with guys in motel rooms, I’d never been attacked like this. I thought of all the movies and TV shows where the hero had been hit from behind with a pistol, losing consciousness. A moment later he would open his eyes, shake the cobwebs out of his head, get up, and go after the bad guys.
I tried to sit up. I raised my head a few inches off the cement floor, but the pain was too great. My head fell back to the floor with a thud.
I cried out as it hit, then I threw up.
As the vomit pooled in front of my face, I started to cry. I must have sucked some of it in—I began to choke. I hacked big time, finally blowing it out of my windpipe, but that just made me vomit more. My breathing was heavy as I lay there, my cheek scraped up pretty bad from the cement but warm in the vomit.
I drifted off, either to sleep or into unconsciousness—I didn’t know and really didn’t care. Not sure how long I was gone. I didn’t hear anyone come into the room, but all of a sudden I felt myself being pulled backwards from behind.
I cried out in pain as the skin on the back of my left hand tore on the rough floor. A man’s voice said, “Ah, shit, look at this.” Another voice: “Get the bucket and the mop. Clean up the puke, then we’ll come back.”
Now I was fully awake. I couldn’t raise my head, but I heard two men working on the vomit. One of them took the bucket and mop out of the room, then returned a minute later with a can of air freshener. He sprayed it, and a moment later I felt the droplets fall on my face. I recognized the pine smell. It was the same air freshener Bruce and I used at our house a long time ago. I heard the two men leave the room.
I tried to think back to what happened, but it only seemed to intensify the pain at the back of my head. I knew I had to remain conscious and try to remember what had occurred if I was to have any chance of escape. But I had to fight hard to resist the impulse to just let myself slip away into unconsciousness.
A little while later I heard a door open and two sets of feet come in. One of the guys bent down and untied my hands, then my ankles. Then he yanked my blindfold off.
Even though the bulb at the ceiling was dim, it seemed bright as ten suns. I closed my eyes reflexively.
I opened them a moment later. The log walls with gray plaster on two sides of the room told me I was in the church. There was a card table and two folding chairs in one corner, a stained mattress in another corner.
One of the guys was Fat Ricky. He was wearing blue jeans—carpenter pants baggy enough for his huge ass and stomach—and a dark blue t-shirt underneath a quilted nylon liner, the kind that zips into a hunting jacket. He had removed the rubber band holding back his thin blond hair, which now hung limp, like vertical blinds obscuring half his face. I couldn’t read an expression, the way his baby fat puffed up his cheeks, making his eyes real small. I’m not sure he had an expression.
The other guy I didn’t know. He was about forty, thin and wiry, maybe six one or two. He had short brown hair, thinning out on top, parted on the side. He wore glasses, no-nonsense wire-rimmed, in silver. His nose was sharp, and he was clean shaven, except that he was starting to grow a mustache. His expression scared the shit out of me: he was calm and resolute. He was like those patriot guys who make YouTube videos. Not the idiots shooting off guns. Not the guys who put up film of Nazis goose-steeping down the wide Paris boulevards.
This guy was more the kind who read a speech right into the camera, or—even worse—typed in the words so that they crawl up the screen silently. What frightened me about these guys is that they’re past being pissed off. They’ve done their research. They’ve given it a lot of thought. They know who the bad guys are and what their motives are. They see patterns that other people don’t see—patterns that other people haven’t been permitted to see. They know that everything is linked up with everything else. They know, for instance, that Jews are evil because of something that happened five thousand years ago that they learned about from getting hold of this particular 1934 edition of the King James Bible and reading the third word on every fourth page of this particular Gospel, which clearly shows that Jews intend to take over Hollywood and eat Christian babies.
They know all about something that happened in a particular town six miles northwest of Warsaw in April 1943. They know about it because it was written up in an article that only a dozen people got to read because the article was so hard-hitting it would’ve brought down the government of the U.S., England, France, and (of course) Lithuania, so these other Jews got together with some Catholic priests who were unhappy about something that happened in 1646 and they killed the guy who wrote the article and blew up all the trucks carrying the article, and that’s exactly why the world is fucked-up in the exact way it’s obviously fucked-up today.
This guy was calm because he knew what he had to do. He turned to Fat Ricky. “Get out,” he said.
Ricky left the room, closing the door behind him.
Then he said, “Take your clothes off.”
I stood there, motionless.
He walked over to me slowly. His right hand came up so fast I didn’t see it. The force of the blow knocked me off balance, and I fell sideways, knocking over one of the chairs and crashing into the card table. I wasn’t sure if he’d broken my jaw, but I knew he was the one who’d killed Dolores Weston.
“I said take your clothes off.”
I did it, quickly.
He pointed to the mattress.
I walked over to it.
“Face down,” he said.
I turned my face to the wall and lay there.
He walked over to my side. His hands grabbed my hips, and he pulled my ass up into the air. I was on my knees, my head still facing the wall. The mattress shifted as he got on. I heard him lower his fly. I felt his hands start to push my thighs apart.
I resisted.
He walked over to my side. In an instant, his foot came up into my ribcage.
I felt a s
earing pain as something cracked inside me.
He went back behind me and pushed my thighs apart.
He thrust into me hard, like he wanted to tear me up inside, like he wanted me to know there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I already knew that. With the back of my head throbbing and my ribs shooting out sparks of pain, it was all I could do to keep from passing out. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on the log wall two feet away. It was gray now with age, cracks showing in the surface. There were trowel marks in the plaster between each log and the one above it and below it, as if the guy was giving it a swirly artistic look. But the plaster between two logs on the same row didn’t have any trowel marks, like he’d come along with a wet rag while it was setting up and smoothed it out. My body finally stopped moving, and the guy pulled out.
I kept looking at the wall. I heard the guy walk over to the door and open it. “You want her?” he said to Ricky. Ricky did.
Chapter 20
A paper cut can make you miserable—at least for the first few minutes—the way all your attention focuses in on that tiny stinging part of your finger. Right now, my attention had no place to focus because too many places hurt. The back of my head, where I’d been hit, probably with the butt of a pistol or a rifle, worried me the most. I knew I had at least a concussion. My face and my hands were ripped up from me being dragged across the cement floor. My jaw ached, and I was missing a tooth on my lower left side. My ribcage sent out sharp flares of pain with each breath. My ankle was sore, and my legs hurt.
The murderer had raped me hard. All rape is violence, of course, and this one was no exception. But it wasn’t about rage with this guy. He wasn’t making me pay for all the women who’d mistreated him, or anything that ordinary and pathetic. It was more like when a guerilla army in Africa or someplace pulls into some town and they rape all the women and girls to make them understand the natural order of things. Our tribe is stronger than your tribe, or else how could we come in here and do this to you? And if we get any of you pregnant, that’s a bonus because we’re putting our genes into you, destroying your tribe. It’s really business, you see. It’s not like we’re getting any pleasure out of it.