He hung the boards from the strings he had attached to the lighting rig. By the time he was done, the lyrics had been exhausted and the rest of the band was vamping. Jeremy’s fingers were dancing down the fretboard with a fully improvised solo.
It took almost no time for Jimmie to break the boards. He threw a punch, a back fist, a roundhouse kick, a hook kick, and a side kick, breaking the boards against their own momentum. It would take longer to name the attacks than it took for him to throw them, but the breaking wasn’t quite done. Jimmie grabbed one last board off the floor, locked his arms and held it facing Kelly. Barely moving her bass, she picked her right leg up and shot a side kick through the board. It was the only kick she knew, and it wasn’t particularly difficult, but it looked spectacular – especially with that slit skirt. Judging by the applause, the audience, which was actually starting to look like a crowd, seemed to appreciate it.
While the crowd cheered Jeremy took a moment to throw a couple of handfuls of CDs out into the crowd. They flew well in their square envelopes. He even got a couple into the balcony level of the club. The CDs held a few songs Jeremy had recorded and mixed on his computer, as well as a file version of the band’s web page.
The band tore through the rest of their set, threw out a few more CDs and then they were done. They got one fast bow before the lights went down. There are no encores for the opening act.
Jeremy thought playing music was one of the best feelings in the world, and tearing down was one of the worst ways to come down from the performance high. Maybe someday they would be the headliners, and they would have people to do it all for them. Until then, though, they had to unplug their own amps, wrap up their own cables, and put their own axes back in their cases. The only good news was that it didn’t take long with everybody helping, and the House of Blues even had a crew that helped even more.
By ten o’clock the band was packed, Jeremy had found Sarah, and Jeremy, Sarah, Kelly, and Steve were trying to decide what to do with the rest of the evening. Jimmie had already decided he wanted to watch the headliners play, so they left him at the club, and set out on their own.
Boaz Pendleton
Everyone who ever met Boaz Pendleton was dead, and to a very real extent this included Boaz himself. Boaz was born on October 29th 1952 and died two days later. After that he didn’t do much until the summer of 1992, when he applied for a social security card.
Because of an odd quirk of law, the only form of identification a person needs to present to get a social security number is a notarized birth certificate. This might be because the average applicant for a social security number is only a few days old, or possibly because there are very few forms of ID that can be obtained without a social security number.
In any case, just about anyone can go to the state department of records and get a notarized copy of any birth certificate. And anyone who knows how to use a library can search old newspapers for death notices of children who died before they were appropriately numbered and tracked by the government.
This has always been one of the easiest and best ways to obtain a false identity, but at the same time there are always a few people who manage to live a good portion of their lives a little bit out of the system, and so it didn’t strike Rachel Goodman as all that unusual when a tall rugged-looking individual in aged but clean overalls stepped up to her window at the Shreveport Social Security office and applied for a number.
He was rough-cut but polite, using a lot of ma’am’s in their conversation. When she asked how he had made it forty years without ID he replied that he had pretty much spent his whole life back in the bayou, and had never seen much need for it. It was a story she had heard before, and since he didn’t look to be fifteen trying to get an ID to pass for twenty-one, and since he didn’t look much like any of the wanted posters her bosses occasionally showed her, she didn’t give it much thought.
Three months later she was dead.
Her burned-out car and her burned-up body were found in a drainage ditch. The bullet in her chest and the lack of jewelry and money on her person had satisfied the police’s curiosity into her death – as far as they were concerned it had been a simple robbery. They did have every intention of catching the foul scum who had committed such a heinous crime, but what they didn’t tell anyone was that they assumed that such a criminal would eventually get caught committing another crime and would thus get punished. In general, criminals tend to be stupid and, in the end, catch themselves.
The police aren’t lazy, just realistic. They did everything in reason to catch the guy. They ran ballistic tests on the bullet, they checked pawnshops for her watch, they did their best to lift fingerprints from the car. But the sad truth was that the best they could really do was wait for the criminal to do it again, and get caught in such a fashion that they could match that crime to this crime.
Aldous, of course, knew all of this. He knew that police departments didn’t have the resources to spend too much time chasing run-of-the-mill homicides. Still, he took precautions. He had waited three months to kill Rachel to be sure that any surveillance tape of their interaction had been taped over. Her jewelry was at the bottom of a lake. (One in Tennessee, where even if it was found it would likely not be linked to this crime.)
The next people to meet the revived Boaz were Bill Gray, a realtor, and Jill Redd, his secretary. It was the summer of 1994 and Boaz hadn’t done much in the two years since he had made the government aware of his existence. Those years were part of Aldous’ time in Memphis, and he had given Boaz a form of life for use in Louisiana. In 1994, Aldous wasn’t quite ready for his move to Louisiana, but he was laying the groundwork. Aldous always planned ahead, and always had options. Ever since he was a teenager he had kept a number of aliases, ready to be stepped into at a moment’s notice.
Bill was a middle-aged man with a potbelly, a balding head, a bad marriage and a fat bank account. Jill was younger and more attractive (as was about half the population) and commonly suspected to have been sleeping with Bill for years. In truth, Bill and Jill had a strictly professional relationship, but gossips have never cared much for the truth, at least when it conflicts with a more interesting story.
Bill sold Boaz a nice chunk of land, at least if you were looking for something that cost almost nothing and was pretty far from anything. The place had a dilapidated cottage on a few acres of theoretically tillable land and, more importantly for Aldous, easy swamp access.
Nobody in town was much surprised when Bill and Jill disappeared in January of 1995. Bill’s wife, Agnes, was actually relieved. She had been fooling around on Bill for years, and viewed his running away with his secretary as a cheaper alternative to divorce. The first thing she did, once she realized he was gone, was clear out the bank accounts and cancel the credit cards. Everyone in town thought that was what Bill deserved and in truth Bill would have vastly preferred being cut off from his finances to his actual fate.
Bill and Jill had the dubious distinction of being the first two souls collected in the back room of Boaz’s new house. It wasn’t a big room, ten by twelve feet or so, furnished only with a heavy wooden cross leaning against one wall. The cross was just the right height that when a person was tied to it, their mouth and nose would be positioned perfectly for Aldous to suck the souls from their dying bodies. The room was plated in galvanized steel, with a drain in the corner.
Jill was first on the cross. She died without fuss; Aldous suspected that she had died inside as soon as he had thrown her bound body into the trunk of Bill’s car. Bill, on the other hand, was a different matter. Aldous had taken Jill’s soul first partly for the effect he hoped it would have on Bill, and he was not disappointed.
From a strict soul-gathering standpoint, the emotional state of Aldous’ prey did not matter. From an aesthetic stance though, it did. Aldous enjoyed terror and pain. There were few things more beautiful than a man who thought of himself as st
rong being reduced to a gibbering pile of fear.
When Aldous slid the knife into Jill’s heart he had made certain that Bill had a good view. Bill was bound in the corner, his arms behind his back, his knees drawn to his chest and his feet against his buttocks. Everyone in the room was naked. Clothes were just another source of forensic evidence, and while the room would soon be swimming in evidence, Aldous always tried to keep it to a minimum. Even though it didn’t matter much in this house that was set up for killing, Aldous felt that good forensic hygiene was the sort of habit that could keep him out of trouble some day.
Aldous left Bill alone with Jill’s body for a few hours; he had time to play. He killed the light as he left the room, but he left the door open so there would be some light filtering down from the hall. He wanted Bill to contemplate Jill’s soulless form.
He went out on the back porch and waited for the screams. It wasn’t a long wait.
Bill screamed for mercy, Bill offered threats and bribes. After a while, Bill howled wordlessly. Aldous watched evening fall, and relished the screams. After the last daylight faded he walked back down the hall, and not long after that all that was left to do was dispose of the bodies.
Bill and Jill were the first killed in the cottage, but they were far from the last. Over the next few years Aldous played host to a string of guests that could only be counted by the number of feathers on his tattooed wings, or the thorns on his tattooed crown.
Boaz Pendleton had served Aldous well as an alias, but Aldous had rules about how long he could use any alias, and Boaz’s time was up. It was time to move on, change cities, and start fresh. He had several new aliases already lined up in several different states, it was just a question of choosing which he wanted to use.
But then Aldous had the idea for his game with Dexter, and decided to keep Boaz just a little longer.
Friday February 14th
10:00 p.m.
After dropping the band gear off at Jeremy’s house, Jeremy, Sarah, Kelly and Steve decided to go to Café Du Monde for some beignets.
The band members were still wired from playing, and had little to talk about except the gig. The consensus on what had gone wrong was ‘not much.’ The consensus on what had gone right was ‘just about everything.’
As they walked, Jeremy signed for Steve, translating most of what was being said. After a while Sarah asked, “So what is up with all this sign language? Are you telling secrets about me?”
Jeremy chuckled, and then translated this for Steve’s benefit. Steve said, “No ma’am, he’s just telling me what everybody is saying. In case you hadn’t figured it out, I am stone deaf.”
Sarah stopped walking, her head cocked slightly to one side. “But … you’re a musician?”
Jeremy explained, “Steve was a musician before he lost his hearing. In fact, he was percussion major. Then he had a fever. When it left him, so did his hearing.”
Sarah said, “Jeremy, has anyone ever told you that pretty much every aspect of your life sounds like the set-up for a bad joke?”
Jeremy grinned. “Not in those words, but that might explain all the pointing and laughing.”
Steve broke in, “Jeremy saved my life. After I lost my hearing I thought my life was over. My sense of time was as good as it had ever been, but I was out of the music program. I had lost my shot at getting into the Marine band. I dropped out of school, and for a while I was living on the street. That is where Jeremy found me.”
Jeremy shrugged. “I was looking for a drummer, and I found one. One night I was walking along and heard some of the most amazing rhythms. I followed my ears and found Steve sitting in a store’s doorway banging away on a couple of five gallon drums and a few metal things that looked like they might have been parts of an old refrigerator: wire racks, copper coils, a box that had probably been a vegetable crisper. He was making a mesmerizing racket. I knew I wanted him to be my drummer. I hung around until he stopped playing and then I tried to talk to him.”
Jeremy had continued to sign while he was talking. Steve broke in. “I guess I must have been pretty obnoxious. This skinny white guy, who hadn’t even tipped me, was coming up to me with his lips flapping. I hated him because he hadn’t tipped. I hated him because he thought I could hear him. I just kept pushing my tip bucket at him, hoping he would go away.”
Jeremy added, “I think we both walked away that night thinking the other was a jerk.”
Steve continued, “It was a good thing for me that Jeremy kept coming back.”
“I couldn’t help it. Steve was that good. I liked listening. I really wanted him as my drummer. It took me a few nights to figure out that he was deaf. Once I had that figured out, I went home and started learning a little sign language.”
Steve continued, “He also wrote me a real nice little love letter. It apologized for getting off on the wrong foot, and said he wanted me to be his drummer. One night he waited until I stopped banging on the buckets, then he came up, signed hello, and gave me that letter. We spent the rest of the night passing notes. He gave me back some of my self-respect. If it weren’t for Jeremy I’d probably still be sleeping in doorways and banging on buckets for tips.”
Sarah tugged on Jeremy’s arm. “So, do you pick up every street performer you see?”
He wrapped his arm around her and said, “Nope, just the special ones.”
Sarah turned to Kelly, “How about you? How did you meet Jeremy?”
“It was a chat room, about six years ago. I was a college freshman from Virginia who knew nobody in New Orleans, so I was spending a lot of time socializing on the computer. We talked online for about two months before we actually met in person.”
“So you two dated?”
Kelly laughed. “No, I think that might have been his idea when we first started chatting, but by the time we saw each other’s faces, I was seeing this guy I had met in one of my writing classes. By the time that jerk left, we were too used to being good friends.”
“How long have you been studying karate?”
Kelly looked puzzled. “I’ve never studied karate. Why do you ask?”
Now it was Sarah’s turn to look puzzled. “During the show… that kick… you broke that board and you looked so good doing it, I figured you had to have a black belt.”
Kelly replied, “Nah, Jimmie is our only black belt. He taught me that kick. It’s pretty easy, if you want to learn it.”
“I’d love to.”
So the whole party stopped in Jackson Square, and Kelly taught Sarah how to throw a side thrust. This was a little frustrating for Steve, because they were in sight of Café Du Monde and he really wanted his beignets. Jeremy was amused and pleased that Kelly and Sarah were getting along. He was certain that Kelly would like Sarah, but he had been a little nervous anyway. Kelly’s approval was important to him. Sometimes he wondered how he was going to get along when she graduated and got a real job and moved away.
First Kelly told Sarah to stomp the ground, bringing her knee as high up toward her chest as she could. Then she had her repeat the motion, except while leaning over to the side. After a few minutes of fine-tuning to get her body in line with the kick, Sarah’s form looked reasonably good. Jimmie had been a good teacher, and Kelly had remembered everything he had told her about the kick.
Sarah said, “That‘s it? That’s all there is to it?”
“Yup. At least as far as I know. Jimmie could probably spend a few hours tweaking it, but you could break a board now, if we had one.”
Sarah pointed a finger at Jeremy and said, “You better treat me right, Jeremy Adams, because I now know how to kick your ass.”
Jeremy laughed, signing a translation for Steve.
Steve said, “That just shows you don’t know everything … even I know that the ass is a bad target. It’s too padded. If you want to hurt him, kick him in the ribs.”
With the martial arts lesson over for the evening, they proceeded across Decatur Street, and finally got their coffee and beignets. They sat in the restaurant for a while, talking about everything and nothing.
Eventually, Kelly made a show of looking at her watch and saying that she needed to get to bed.
Jeremy didn’t even have to sign Kelly’s words to Steve; he already knew it was time to let the lovebirds have some time alone. As they parted ways, Kelly leaned close and whispered, “You can keep this one” in Jeremy’s ear.
Saturday February 15th
12:30 a.m.
As Jeremy and Sarah headed back to Jeremy’s house, he said he had a song he wanted her to hear. When they reached the house, Jeremy directed Sarah to the couch, ran upstairs, grabbed his Martin acoustic from beside his bed, checked its tuning, and trotted downstairs. He stood in front of Sarah, and began to sing.
I saw her standing on a pedestal
With angel wings spread wide
Was her pose so compelling
Or was it something in her eyes?
Or was she just a clean white slate
That I covered with
the story of her life
when I wrote that story
Every word was true
If not exactly accurate
From my angel’s point of view
But now that I’ve talked to her
and I’ve held her hand
I have no need for stories
or for made up lies
I know she’ll always be
an angel in my eyes
Their eyes were locked as he sang. When he was done, Sarah produced a large envelope from behind her back. Jeremy’s first reaction was puzzlement, he couldn’t figure out where it had come from. It seemed bigger than her little clutch handbag, and didn’t look like it would have fit into her tight dress.
His puzzlement must have showed, because Sarah said, “It’s called a card. It’s for you.”
The Whisper Garden Page 10