Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  “I understand.”

  “But I’d say fuck ’em and be over there right now, except some guys arrived this morning and cranked up the bulldozers and a line of dump trucks just pulled in. Some kind of bullshit legal papers came in the mail, but I was so busy chasing around town I haven’t opened an envelope in days.

  “Seems I missed a court date, so the city gave themselves legal authority to demolish the motel and sent over ten badasses to do the dirty work. These hombres don’t speak English and I’ve used up all the Spanish I know. So it’s only because I’m standing here in front of the place with a shovel in my hands that the Silver Sands isn’t a pile of rubble at the moment.”

  “Take care of your business, Frank. I can handle this.”

  “The fucker won’t come till Saturday. By then I’ll have this mess fixed, and I’ll be there.”

  “If he stays on schedule, yeah. Saturday.”

  “You have reason to think otherwise?”

  “He came after Buddha late Friday, so maybe he’s not fussy about Saturday.”

  “I might be able to get over there later today if I can resolve this.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Frank. Save your place.”

  “What about Sugarman? He’d back you up.”

  “He’s hiking the Grand Canyon with his daughters. Won’t be back till Sunday.”

  “You lied about packing heat, didn’t you? You got Hilton’s handgun.”

  “Only two rounds left. But, yeah, I got it.”

  “Well, if I were you I’d get in your car right now, and go stock up on ammunition.”

  “Good luck with the bulldozers.”

  Frank sighed.

  “Good luck with the ice pick.”

  The rain blew through, leaving behind a sparkle in the grass and so much moisture in the air that every solid thing turned blurry.

  Thorn went up to the apartment and showered and dressed. Today the alligator on his chest was orange, the shirt blue. He tucked Buddha’s .38 into the waistband of his jeans, leaving his shirttail out, then retrieved the Sports Craze bag, dumped the contents on the bed, and chose one of the two baseballs.

  He spent a while pitching the ball to Boxley. It took the dog three throws to grasp the concept of retrieving and giving it up to Thorn. But once he had the hang of it, he didn’t want to stop.

  Thorn stayed out in the wide lawn tossing the ball until he was drenched with sweat, but if anybody was watching, if anybody was considering using an ice pick on someone in this house, they should be aware they’d have to come through him and a Doberman first.

  At noon April called out to tell him there were sandwiches and iced tea in the dining room if he cared to come inside.

  He washed up in the guest bath in April’s study, and was heading back to the foyer when his gaze ticked across the shelves of books. He halted and stared up at the high school yearbooks that were stored on the top shelf.

  There were four of them from freshman to senior year. He started with the earliest and flipped through the pages until he found the group pictures of the sports teams. He didn’t spot his two sons on the football team or the soccer team or the tennis team. And they weren’t anywhere in the hardy gang of young men who played baseball that year.

  He was about to set the book aside when he noticed a familiar face in the back row of the junior varsity baseball team, a gangly boy taller than his peers, with unkempt hair and a face peppered by acne. His uniform was baggy and his nose was a half size too large for his face. On his lips the remains of a snarl lingered, as if just before the camera clicked he’d been trading taunts with a teammate.

  Below the photo, his name was listed among all the other fine young freshmen hopefuls: Jeffrey Jay Matheson (right field).

  Thorn paged through the other yearbooks. In his sophomore year Matheson made the team again. Still stuck in right field. No sign of Flynn or Sawyer on any of the other teams. In his junior year Matheson disappeared from the varsity. But at the bottom of the page he appeared in a small photo, demoted to team manager.

  Senior year, he disappeared from the team altogether.

  “Your peanut butter sandwich is getting cold,” Garvey said. “Better get in here, Mr. Extra Crunchy, before I have my way with it.”

  He followed Garvey to the dining room. The table was set, April sitting at the head.

  “Jeff Matheson,” Thorn said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “He played baseball in high school.”

  Garvey sat down and cut her sandwich in half with a knife and started in.

  “Is that important? Playing baseball.”

  Thorn said yes, it was, he believed it might be very important.

  “He’s three doors down. A yellow house.”

  “Three doors down?”

  “It’s where he grew up, where he’s always lived. That’s how he knew the boys so well. He spent more time here than at his own house.”

  Thorn gave her a questioning look.

  “No, it couldn’t be,” she said. “It couldn’t be Jeff. He’s a gentle spirit.”

  “Is he?”

  “I’ve never heard him say a harsh or unkind word.”

  “He must’ve worked very hard to keep that side hidden from you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Thorn waved the question away.

  “The video you showed me, at the shrink’s office, is there still something between Flynn and him?”

  “Flynn moved on long ago.”

  “Did Jeff?”

  She studied the back of her ringless hand.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I never see him with anyone.”

  “Is the handsome stranger going to eat or just stand there and talk?”

  “The handsome stranger,” Thorn said, “is off on his next adventure.”

  “Praise the Lord,” Garvey said. “It’s about damn time.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THOUGH MATHESON’S HOUSE WAS SIMILAR in style to April’s, it had been designed by a lesser architect and constructed by indifferent carpenters. Over the years the structure had been so badly neglected, it looked as if it had been abandoned for years. Its walls were pitted and tagged with graffiti, windowpanes were cracked and held in place with masking tape, and sagging furniture cluttered the front porch. An ancient washing machine was rusting peacefully in the side yard beside the overturned hull of a motorboat, while the front walkway was lined with crumbling stone pots that held the withered stalks of plants. Even in its prime, this house had been no beauty, but now with its foundation sinking, it slumped to one side like a man struggling with a pail of water.

  Jeff’s tiger-striped pickup was not in the driveway or inside the garage, which stood open and was too littered with lawn mowers and bicycles and broken furniture to hold one more piece of junk.

  Thorn mounted the porch and rapped on the door.

  The door didn’t cave in but seemed to consider it. Nothing stirred.

  He knocked again, stealing a look over his shoulder at the well-maintained houses across the street. No one was standing at any windows he could see. No one out in their nicely maintained yards. Driveways empty. Solid citizens starting a new workweek.

  He edged around the porch to the western side of the house. Going along, he made a show of calling out hello. He gave a window a furtive tug but it was locked. He tried another with the same result.

  At the back of the house, the yard that ran down to the river was barren, no grass, no foliage, only a single leafless tree with a rotting tire swing hanging from a branch on the end of a tattered rope. A wood object lay in the mud in the shade of the tree. Thorn left the porch, walked over, and picked up the handle of the broken bat. An ancient wooden Louisville Slugger, two-thirds of it missing.

  He dropped it and headed back to the house and found the back door locked. Pressing his nose to the glass, he peered into a laundry room and t
he narrow hallway that seemed to lead to the heart of the house.

  He dug Buddha’s pistol from his waistband, held it by the barrel, and cracked the glass with the butt, then reached inside and unlocked the door to let himself in. He tucked the pistol back beneath his shirt.

  Any single piece of evidence against Matheson was flimsy and merely circumstantial, but the list was impressively long. A member of the baseball team; a broken bat in a field; the young man’s abrasive, unhinged manner when Thorn and Frank spoke with him at his office; the kid actually confessing to the crimes, an act so outrageous no one took him seriously. And yet those were the first words that came to his lips. The fact that Matheson had been at Poblanos Friday afternoon and could have tailed Thorn and Buddha to the Waterway Lodge. He had easy access to the Moss home, which made it a cinch to lift the obituaries and trim their edges with the pinking shears. And for motive, there was Flynn.

  The twisted desire to promote Flynn’s career, and perhaps be rewarded with his renewed attention.

  For the next half hour Thorn roamed the house, opening drawers and closets and cabinets, peering under furniture, lifting mattresses from the beds and searching beneath them, rifling through heaps of laundry that were in various states of decomposition. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but whatever it was, he wasn’t finding it.

  He unearthed nothing but a dismal collection of possessions, the minimal toiletries and dreary wardrobe of a transient who’d crashed here for the night. And the corroding appliances and featureless furniture one might expect to find in a flophouse going broke.

  He made another circle of the house, discovering a door or two he hadn’t noticed before, doors that opened on bare shelves or empty spaces. He was doing his second tour of the upstairs when he saw the seam in the faded wallpaper. Printed in reds and greens on the wallpaper was a scene of the English countryside with men on horseback chasing after their foxhounds, a scene repeated and repeated across the wall of the landing, all that action and color obscuring the hairline joint.

  Thorn found a dime in his pocket and used it to pry the flap of wood open. Maybe it had once been the storage cabinet for a fold-down ironing board, but Jeff Matheson had stripped the interior space clean and turned it into a shrine.

  The centerpiece was a snapshot of Flynn and Jeff as eight- or nine-year-olds standing beside each other, arms over the other’s shoulder, with a green field behind them. Flynn’s blond hair was barely long enough to comb and part. Jeff’s style matched Flynn’s, but his dark hair was coarser and a cowlick swirled at the back. Circling that photograph like the rings of Saturn were photographs of Flynn as a boy and Flynn as a TV star and Flynn romping in the surf and Flynn running through tall grass. Some of the photos had been trimmed with scissors, editing out others, leaving Flynn disembodied from his surroundings. There were shots of an older and more stylish Flynn coming and going from the Moss home and from restaurants and nightclubs around Miami. Flynn and Flynn and Flynn. There were reviews of Miami Ops posted at the bottom, newspaper clippings, a paragraph from Kansas City, one from Arizona, another from L.A. Words underlined, words scratched out, the editorial corrections made in a tiny harebrained scrawl. The whole creation had been coated with some yellowish gelatin as if to give it an arty feel.

  At the very top of the collage was a handwritten note on a square of white paper. In block letters it read, We had fun, but it’s over. Please leave me alone. It was signed simply Flynn.

  But Matheson had not left Flynn alone. He had hovered, he had watched, he had collected. And he had even ingratiated his way back into the Moss household by clearing their home of pests. He never left the neighborhood. Never moved on. He had stalled out as an adolescent. Held on to his first crush with a feverish devotion.

  As Thorn stepped back to close the door, he saw the object fixed to the back of the flimsy door, just above Thorn’s head. A lifelike human face. A mask of Flynn Moss, with his dark blue eyes, his straight nose, broad forehead, thin lips, and ruddy cheeks. Flynn at his current age. Thorn reached out and touched the rubbery flesh, as firm and cool as a slab of liver. What ceremonies Matheson performed with that mask, Thorn would not let himself imagine.

  He was shutting the flap of wood, returning it to its perfect alignment, when the front door opened on squealing hinges and shut with a solid thump. Thorn smoothed the door of the shrine, then hustled to the landing at the head of the stairs and listened.

  Either Matheson was light-footed as hell, or he was standing in place sniffing the air. It would come as no surprise to learn the kid possessed a sense of smell so acute that he detected Thorn’s odor the second he stepped onto the front porch. Thorn had met the type before, trappers, hunters, trackers, men and women who’d spent so many years catching animals, they’d trained their neurons and learned levels of stealth and observation and a stillness of breath that to ordinary folks seemed paranormal. The tick of claws on wood, the brush of rat whiskers against a solid wall were clashing cymbals to them. All they needed was one stray molecule of sweat, a microdot of urine.

  Thorn held his ground. He could see the head of the stairs, and down below he could make out the right edge of the front door.

  The whisper of a shadow crossed a slit of sunlight beside the front door. The faint groan of floorboards. Matheson smelled him, or felt the barometric disturbance or saw the scuff marks in the dust on the stairs. Whatever subatomic clues were guiding him, they were working. He was coming up.

  That’s when Thorn saw the door flap. There was a small telltale warp at the bottom where he had failed to press the seam flat.

  Thorn ducked back inside the bedroom. Maybe in some distant incarnation that room had been used for guests. But there was nothing welcoming about it now, with its tattered bedspread and bare walls and a single bulb in an ancient fixture. Thorn pressed his back against the wall beside the door and waited. If Jeff was being guided by smell, then the jig was up.

  But when he reached the top of the stairs, instead of heading straight ahead into the room where Thorn was hiding, Jeff turned right, away from his shrine, and drifted into his bedroom.

  Thorn waited.

  He waited some more. Jeff was mumbling. Jeff was opening a squeaky cabinet door. Jeff was pissing like a stallion.

  Thorn slipped out of the room, eased down the stairway, and hot-footed it out the door in twenty seconds. He headed for the sidewalk, then saw Jeff’s truck and made a detour. He went to the far side of the Ford, so he could keep one eye on the house, then drew open the passenger door. The cab was littered with receipts and fast food containers and the hand tools of his trade. Wooden traps and a jar of peanut butter to bait them.

  Thorn checked the glove compartment and found it packed with old parking tickets and speeding tickets and more receipts and small notepads. He shut the door quietly and moved to the bed, which was piled high with metal cages in which the boy trapped possums, raccoons, and foxes. The putrid smell of death and shit and fright was overpowering. No amount of scrubbing would ever cleanse the bed liner of all the blood and fur and rank karma.

  Near the tailgate, peeking out from under a white garbage bag that held the carcass of some small mammal, Thorn saw a patch of black material that shimmered like moonlight on still waters. He tugged it from beneath the weight of the dead animals and held it up.

  A black Zentai suit. He examined it quickly until he found the three-inch rip in the right ankle.

  The gash made by Thorn’s right hand. At the time his fingers were still swollen and sore from Buddha’s amazing marksmanship, yet somehow he’d managed to snag the guy’s leg and slash a fist-sized hole. He lay the suit over the tailgate and shifted one of the larger cages. It was filled with straw and smelled like shrimp left in the sun. And there were the shoes, the goofy, Halloween shoes. Vibram FiveFingers. One scarlet blotch on the silver mesh.

  A swell of heat rose through his chest, funneled upward, and expanded into his face. His throat constricted and he stared up at the house. A
n urge all too familiar to him throbbed in his gut. A blaze of rage. He raised his shirt and was starting to draw the .38 when he heard the scuff of feet behind him, and a heavy cord tightened around his throat.

  He managed to swing partway around and see Jeff Matheson holding the end of the snare pole, a solid grip on the handle that tightened the loop.

  Dog catchers controlled enraged pit bulls with the same simple device, and Jeff seemed to be handling his end of the pole with certainty and skill.

  “You were fucking around in my house.”

  Thorn kicked at the black suit that lay on the ground between them, lifting it with a toe, then letting it drop. It was all the communication he could manage, other than a strangled grunt.

  “That’s not mine. Don’t try to pin this on me, motherfucker.”

  With a ferocity that had been building for months as he watched Rusty lose her hold on life, and saw Buddha’s lifeless body curled naked in the bathtub, Thorn took hold of the rope with both hands, wheeled and kicked, and flung himself at Matheson. He knocked Jeff backward a foot or two. Sent him to the ground.

  But Matheson didn’t lose his grip on the pole and wrenched Thorn down with him. The angle of the noose bit deep, and Thorn, choking, tasting blood, tore at the rope, got some slack, worked it up and over his chin.

  Scrambling to his feet, Matheson wiggled the pole in a practiced way, undoing Thorn’s work. He yanked Thorn to his feet, smiling as he tightened the loop around his airway, and Thorn’s afternoon went black.

  He was still standing, weak-kneed, when he came to seconds later, held in place by the snare pole. Wobbling, blurry-eyed.

  One idea in his head. One faint notion. He drew Buddha’s pistol and aimed.

  “Bullshit,” Jeff said. “Guys like you don’t shoot guys like me.”