Cutter

by Laird, Thomas

  I walked out toward the back fence, toward the alley, and the grass was wet and freezingly cold. I stopped at the fence and looked both ways. Nothing that I could see. The surveillance guys were supposed to give us about a block’s space so Karrios wouldn’t be scared away before he tried to get inside.

  I turned and walked back toward the house. I was heading for our bedroom. Something was wrong. Natalie didn’t play games like this. She wouldn’t run out of the house without telling me something was up.

  I reached the porch at the back of the house and walked back in through the door. I had the gun clamped tightly in my hand, and I could feel those intangible fingers grabbing at the muscle on my neck. It was damn’ near throttling me.

  I walked into the house, turned on another light inside the kitchen, headed right toward our bedroom to retrieve the handheld radio — and then there was another muffled sound coming from the front of the house. This time I bolted toward the front door, threw it open, aimed the piece in front of me —

  Right at the noggin of my red-headed bride, who had her own nine-millimeter pointed squarely at my neck.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Natalie! What’re youdoing out here?’

  ‘Whew ... Jimmy, God. I thought I heard something out on the front porch. When I came out here the first time, I heard something coming from the back of the house. So I ran back into the yard and then I thought someone was back out here, messing with me ... I finally found two cats who were rolling around in the throes of romance. They were having a mobile go of it, from our front porch to our backyard. You didn’t hear all the yowling?’

  ‘I thought that prick was in the house. I thought he had you, because I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘From now on I’ll wake you up if I think I hear something out of the ordinary.’

  She led me back into the house. The invisible grips on the base of my skull were finally released.

  ‘You have great legs, Jimmy. Anybody ever told you that?’ she said as she shut the door and tripped the dead bolt.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  We were summoned once more, near the university where Karrios had assaulted the geology teacher Jack’d become more than attached to. This time the request came from that same County Sheriff we’d dealt with when we went out there previously.

  Sheriff Espinoza met us at the cornfield that lay beyond the farmhouse where Marco had mangled Ellen Jacoby.

  There was a tractor sitting out some hundred yards from where Espinoza was waiting for us. We pulled the Taurus to a stop by the house, and Jack and Doc and I got out of the vehicle. We walked over to the Sheriff.

  ‘They found something in the field. They were plowing it up to put in some kind of late crop, and they found a body. Her name was Dee Dee Tremont. He buried her stuff with her. I guess he figured she’d be safe out there, but when he left this place the owner of the property decided Karrios wasn’t likely to be coming back. So the owner was going to try and use the land again until he sold it to someone else.’

  We walked out to the yellow markers that surrounded the remains. When we arrived, there were three deputies keeping watch over Dee Dee Tremont’s body, or what was left of it.

  ‘It’s his work, all right,’ Doc confirmed.

  There was not much left to work with, but we could see that the body’d been mutilated, slit up the middle. The insects hadn’t left much, but there was enough flesh still left on it to indicate that it was a good bet that someone else hadn’t planted this woman out in a corn field.

  ‘You guys have anything new on this Karrios?’ Sheriff Espinoza asked.

  ‘He’s been underground. He got himself clipped by a wiseguy, and we’re sort of hoping he died from the wound,’ Jack explained.

  ‘That’d be too bad, if you really think about it,’ the Sheriff said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because it’d wind up like the way it did for that guy in England. You know. The real Jack the Ripper. The killings just stopped because the son of a bitch disappeared. He never got caught. Can you imagine how those Scotland Yard types must have felt, not knowing if the bastard might come back and start things up all over again?’

  We began to walk back to our car. The County ME had already made his examination. This was just a courtesy call for the three of us. Espinoza’s people would handle the rest and would share any information they came up with. It wouldn’t be of much use to us because we already knew who killed Dee Dee Tremont. But something might be found on her that could help us.

  I thanked the Sheriff for letting us in on what had happened in the cornfield. We got back in the car and headed east, back to the city.

  *

  Dee Dee Tremont had been in the missing-persons file for some time. Her parents had reported her as gone, weeks ago. We investigated and found that she’d been seen last at a bar on Rush Street. Since it had been a while, all the bartender could remember was that the guy she left with fitted the general description for Marco Karrios. Nothing else we found out helped us locate Marco.

  *

  We got a call from the Fire Department. When there was arson involved and when someone had been killed in a fire, we were contacted.

  The fire was on the far northwest side, at the edge of the city limits. Jack and Doc and I were off again in the Ford. It took maybe a half-hour in light early-afternoon traffic to make it out to the location. When we arrived we saw not much left but debris. It looked like Berlin after an Allied night raid in early 1945. The building was a skeleton. It was a three-flat and, even though it was brick, there was not much left of the outside of the structure.

  The Fire Captain was standing out in the street, waiting for us.

  ‘We had to wait a few hours for the heat to subside,’ Captain Danson told us. ‘That’s why there was a delay in getting ahold of you. I couldn’t get anyone inside that place for a while. Whatever set it off must have been highly flammable. I mean, the heat was intense. The investigator from arson thinks someone used an accelerant ... The body’s on the second floor. We needed a hoist to get the investigator up there. The stairs were gone. He said there’s very little left of whoever it was on that floor. Not even teeth. It was an extraordinarily hot blaze ... But they found the occupant’s car on the street. We know it was his because the landlord came out and pointed it out for the investigator. That’s why they called you, Lieutenant Parisi. The guy on the second floor fit the general description for Marco Karrios. Wasn’t that his name? ... Well, we figured you might want to get prints off the vehicle. They’ve got it blocked off. It’s over there.’

  He pointed about a quarter of a block to our left.

  The three of us walked down to where two patrolmen were guarding the car. We showed them our ID and they let us take a look. We inspected the interior — the door was unlocked. We checked out the trunk. Doc popped it with his burglar’s tool. There were clothes and a few other objects. But we’d need a print man to find out if these pieces belonged to Marco.

  We walked back toward the fire scene. The blaze must’ve begun when the other tenants were at work. It was lucky they hadn’t been in their beds.

  ‘Self-immolation?’ Doc asked, as we looked at the smoldering rubble.

  ‘Could’ve been the ether. Could’ve just been suicide. That’d be the way this cheesedick’d leave. With a big burst of glory,’ Jack suggested.

  ‘Why suicide?’ I asked them.

  ‘He’s got a lot of people after him, Jimmy,’ Doc concluded. ‘Maybe he was cut off from his cash, too. And he was hurt pretty bad. After Sal disappears in witness protection, he must know we’re watching his lock box. We cut him off, and maybe he figures his string’s run out. Fortuna’s not in prison yet, and Big John has a contract out on him.’

  ‘We need to see the landlord. Right away.’

  Jack went over to the Fire Captain. The fireman pointed to a short bald man standing out in the street near the three of us.

  I walked over to the landlord with my partners.

>   ‘Mr Strezcak,’ Jack said. ‘We’re with the police.’

  The bald guy looked up. He was depressed by the waste of his property. It was all over his sad mug.

  ‘We’ll need a description of the man in that second-floor apartment,’ I told him.

  ‘Why would he torch the place?’ the short man groaned. ‘Jesus Christ, he could’ve killed all of those other people —’

  ‘Please, sir. We could use that description right away. I mean now,’ I explained.

  So the four of us went for a walk down the street.

  *

  Karrios had darkened his hair, added a mustache and a beard, and had put on about twenty pounds, we found out. Strezcak worked with our sketch artist for about an hour until the artist came up with a match of Karrios’s new face. We got copies of it out as soon as the sketch was finished. The landlord moaned again about the loss of his property and the potential holocaust that might have occurred if all the other occupants had been home.

  ‘Upstairs has two little girls. Jesus Christ. What kind of a maniac would do a thing like that?’

  Then he left.

  ‘He’s right,’ Doc added. ‘What kind of a loose joint would kill himself the way Marco did?’

  Fifteen minutes later we got a call that confirmed the prints on the shirts and pants and underwear that had been left in the car. It was Karrios.

  ‘You can sleep again at night, Jimmy P,’ Doc grinned.

  ‘They can’t do a positive ID on the remains, they said,’ I reminded him and Wendkos.

  ‘From the remains they can still come up with a general body size, Jimmy,’ Jack said.

  ‘No prints. No dental. That cop out in the boonies, Espinoza, was right. It’s like the guy in London. He disappears and no one’s sure he’s really gone.’

  ‘The odds are with us this time, guinea. It’s him,’ Doc said. ‘He didn’t have the balls to keep up his act. Too much hot wind on the back of his neck. It was Karrios, Jimmy.’

  *

  What Doc had concluded about the body was substantiated by the remains of the crispy critter they found in the shower stall on the second floor. If the Fire Department had arrived later, they would’ve had a one-level building — everything would’ve fallen to the ground. They had to remove the remains by using a cherry picker that the arson detective used to get close to the body. It wasn’t a very heavy body to remove. Most of it was ash. There were only fragments of a few bones remaining. The teeth were so badly burned up that they couldn’t use a dental scheme to prove who it was that was in that shower stall. All we really had was the stuff we found in the auto mobile. I couldn’t get myself comfortable about any of it. I thought Doc and Jack were simply trying to stroke me so that I’d stop worrying about Marco, but I didn’t think they liked it either that we hadn’t got a positive ID. They put on a good show for me, however.

  We were at yet another lunch at Garvin’s in Berwyn. Jack was about to be reassigned to another case because our Captain had decided that the red names of all those female victims were going to be changed to black lettering. This case was on the books, the Captain insisted. No one was more relieved it was over than our boss. He had had considerable heat blown at his ass over Marco Karrios.

  ‘We’ve got a multiple homicide on the far North Side. We’ve got singles on the west side, and that’s about it. The caseload seems to be clearing up a bit. Chicago is becoming the safest city in the Midwest.’ Doc grinned as he sipped his glass of Sprite.

  Garvin came limping down the bar with our Italian beefs. It was new on his menu. We were his guinea pigs, the barman explained.

  ‘Why don’t you take your vacation now, Jimmy? You still have two weeks left, don’t you?’ Doc proffered.

  Garvin slammed the plates down as he always did and then he gimped back toward the kitchen.

  ‘We’re saving the time to go visit Natalie’s mother over Christmas.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well, I’m thinking about heading to the islands. The Caribbean, you know, mon?’

  ‘I can picture you there. You’re the one with the fish-white gut.’

  ‘There’s a reason God made us white ... Take a leave of absence, Jimmy. You look all tired out. And your b.p.’s still up, isn’t it?’

  I looked over at him but I didn’t answer.

  I couldn’t come down from all this. It was the way it was after firefights in the Vietnam War I was in. You came out of some scary-assed situation where you were on nothing but adrenalin for a few hours, and it was almost impossible to come down from the screaming high where you were. Booze didn’t calm me. I didn’t use drugs because I never had any use for them or for the people who used them. Nothing would calm me; nothing but a lot of time.

  It was that way when Celia Dacy died. It took a few months before I was able to even talk to my current wife Natalie after that business was resolved.

  ‘You need to get out of town, bro. The Captain’ll grant you the leave. Shit, you must have three months of unused vacation time coming.’

  ‘I’ve got eighty-four days accumulated,’ I told him with a smile.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jimmy. You’re a hoarder. That’s what the hell you are.’

  He chomped into his Italian beef.

  ‘This guy Garvin is a genius, dago. Christ, he’s outdone himself again ... Hey! Old man! Can you hear me back in that kitchen?’

  *

  We were back on swing shift the next week. We were both working afternoons first, but after this week, Natalie wouldn’t be matching my time off.

  I’d thought about Gibron’s idea of taking off for a few weeks, but Natalie’s schedule wouldn’t allow it. And I was certainly not going anywhere without her and the kids. We were in the middle of the summer heat of late July, and my family had finally arrived home, here on the North Side. My mother was back, of course, but I thought she would’ve preferred to spend more time with Nick. She’d always been in love with him. It just didn’t work out for them to wind up together. Since she was the widow of his brother, there was no chance for them to be together at the end of their lives. But I thought she saw him on the sly from time to time.

  I heard things in the night. I couldn’t relax and fall asleep. I kept dreaming Marco was alive and that he was going to make good on meeting up with me. It was unfinished business for him if he was still alive.

  I repeated to myself constantly that it had been Karrios in that fire. Doc was right: he came to the end of his string and he killed himself. Without any worries that he might burn alive everyone else in the three-flat. That would be Karrios, though. He wouldn’t care about bystanders. The thought gave me some reason to calm myself. It was precisely how this dick would’ve done himself. The flames were glory. The spectacle was a final ‘in-our-faces’. We could not catch him. Here I was, he was telling us. He left the car behind to ensure we’d know who it was.

  We still didn’t have the report on the accelerant. We still didn’t know if DNA would help confirm his identity. The inferno had done a complete job on the corpse. We wouldn’t be able to find evidence of the wound Sal had inflicted on him, but we did have military health records. They took blood from him as they did with all GIs. We’d just have to see if there was enough left to complete a worthwhile test. The forensics people were not optimistic on this point.

  *

  Natalie rolled to her left, and I could see that she was smiling.

  ‘Your energy level’s back up. See? Our evening walks have lowered your blood pressure and have increased your get-up-and-go.’

  ‘Sometimes I got the get-up, but no go.’

  ‘Cut it out, Jimmy. You are a wonderful lover.’

  ‘I never asked you if I was your first.’

  ‘You weren’t, lover.’

  I looked over at her, but she had removed the smile.

  ‘I didn’t reckon that you’d saved it for me. Don’t get angry at me, Natalie.’

  ‘I’m not. I thought I saw disappointment on that swarthy dago face.’

/>   ‘Hey. I wasn’t a virgin. Why should you be? You’re a grown-up.’

  She reached over and tickled my throat. She knew it drove me nuts. Then she giggled.

  ‘Never loved anybody but you.’ She grinned.

  I wished I could tell her the same thing, but I didn’t lie to her.

  Her face went serious again.

  ‘You think he’s still alive, don’t you?’

  ‘I wish I knew for sure that he was dead, that’s all. It’s like they’re saying in the media. No solid identification. I know they’re using that just so they can keep this fuck’s legend alive, but it still disturbs me a whole goddamned lot.’

  ‘You’ve got to calm down, baby. You can’t let him keep you in his hooks. That’s why he did himself the way he did. He knew you’d be bothered by it. So don’t let him get away with it ... By the way. I missed.’

  ‘Missed? Missed what? ... Oh Christ ... How long?’

  ‘A few weeks, Jimmy. But my little friend tends to show up on time. I just thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘You think you’re pregnant?’

  ‘I haven’t had the pukes in the morning yet.’

  ‘What do you think, though?’

  ‘I think you should get over to me and make it a unanimous decision.’

  ‘You can only get knocked up one at a time, Natalie.’

  ‘Please, Lieutenant. Tell me more. Tell me all about it. Instruct me.’

  I rolled toward her and I kissed her. She had the ability to distract me. She had the power and the ability to do what no one else seemed able to do.

  ‘What do you suppose the odds are, Natalie?’

  She came up off the bed and changed places with me. They called it ‘female astride’, I believed.

  Then she looked at me with those killer eyes and told me:

  ‘It’s over. He’s dead. He’s gone. Life goes on and so do we.’

  She lowered her face slowly toward me until she filled my field of vision. She was all I could see.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Fortuna grudgingly accepted our invitation to have a sit-down downtown. He was under indictment, but I heard he was also trying to set up a deal like his soldier Salvatore Donofrio. Sal had gone into hiding and John wanted to squeal for a deal on the current Don, Santos Marichante.