by James Newman
A horn honked.
He glanced in the Bronco’s cracked rearview mirror, saw a sour-faced man in a dusty VW bug behind him.
He threw up one hand, quickly pulled over to the shoulder.
The man tooted his horn again. As the Beetle puttered on down the road, Nick noticed a faded bumper sticker on its back window: JESUS IS COMING, R U READY? He wondered if it was that appointment the guy had been so afraid he’d miss.
He killed the Bronco’s ignition.
Wondered why he was here.
What the hell did he plan to do now? What was he looking for, exactly? He didn’t have a clue. But he had promised Melissa he would try.
He leaned over, scrounged around in the glove compartment until he found an old pair of work gloves. They had been crammed down in there ever since he first bought the Bronco secondhand, and he had never gotten around to throwing them out. He slid them into his back pocket, just in case (he was about to go snooping around a crime scene, after all).
He climbed out of the Bronco. Pulled back his hood. His shaved scalp and gnarled forehead were slick with sweat.
He crossed the road and stepped onto the overgrown lawn. The high grass whispered against his shins. It had rained here recently; the air smelled of mud and, faintly, manure from the pasture down the road.
Nick took the three steps leading up to the porch in a single stride, ducking through a gap in the police tape to access the front door.
He dug into his pocket for the key Melissa had given him.
But then his breath caught in his throat.
At one time, more of that yellow crime-scene tape had been stretched across the threshold to warn away the curious. Now it lay in a pile at Nick’s feet, like a dead snake.
The door was ajar. The lock had been busted.
Nick gently pushed on the door, forcing it open just far enough so he could enter by turning sideways. He wondered if he should announce his presence, call out to whomever might still be in the house. No...he decided it would be best to keep the element of surprise in his favor till he knew what he was up against.
He stepped through a small living room, past a recliner, a loveseat, and a coffee table stained with old cup-rings. The house was dark. It had that stale “closed-in” odor of a place that has been empty of any human presence for a while, a smell that was not too strong but still slightly unpleasant. Against one wall stood a widescreen TV and a tall potted plant that had starved to death weeks ago.
In the hallway that connected the living room to the rear of the house, the beige carpet was matted with an ugly maroon blotch. The stain spread out approximately three feet in diameter, but did not stop at the baseboard; it climbed several inches up the wall in a starburst pattern. Dozens of black dots speckled the wall as well—damage left by the spray of shotgun pellets.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this was the spot where Eddie had been murdered.
Nick swallowed a foul taste in his mouth, stepped over the stain.
...and he heard a loud THUMP toward the back of the house.
He froze.
Another THUD, followed by a muffled curse.
He wished he had a weapon. Thought about going back for the tire iron in his truck. Tried not to think about the possibility that he might be creeping up on a trigger-happy cop.
He took another cautious step forward.
He had never realized how difficult it was for a guy his size to sneak. Of course, with the exception of a crude storyline in the early days of his “feud” with Big Bubba Bad-Ass—he had “broken into” Eric’s house, and as the marks booed him on the Widowmaker “planted video cameras” throughout his enemy’s home: in a bedroom, the shower, everywhere Big Bubba shared intimate moments with his bikini-model wife—Nick Bullman had never had any reason to sneak around. He feared that his every step could be heard all the way back in Midnight. He imagined the customers in Annie’s Country Diner holding on to their seats, staring wide-eyed at the ripples in their coffee each time one of his Size 16 boots touched the floor.
He sucked in a deep breath, held it as he moved through the house: past a cluttered utility room...a bathroom so tiny he suspected he’d get stuck if he tried to turn around in there...and a bedroom decorated with posters of brooding, black-clad rock stars. The latter, he assumed, was where his granddaughter once slept.
Again he heard movement. It came from the master bedroom up ahead, on his right. Sounded like someone searching for something—drawers being yanked open, footsteps pacing back and forth. And, every few seconds, exasperated curses in a thick Southern accent...
“Dammit, you gotta be in here somewhere!”
Nick slid along the wall, inching closer, until he stood just three or four feet from the open doorway of the master bedroom.
A floorboard creaked beneath his boot.
The noises abruptly ceased.
Nick mouthed a breathless curse. He stood statue-still. Waiting, listening. Wishing again that he had a weapon...
After for what felt like forever, he again moved toward the bedroom.
He risked a glance through the doorway.
Clothes were tangled and strewn all over the floor. On the king-sized bed lay jagged pieces of a shattered acoustic guitar. A lamp dangled off a nightstand, its cord stretched taut. Against the wall to Nick’s right stood a large mirrored dresser; half of its drawers hung open, the other half were dumped upside-down on the floor.
Nick stepped into the bedroom.
He was alone. But how...?
At the back of the room a thin doorway opened onto another small bathroom. A rectangle of evening sunlight bled through a frosted-glass window above the toilet. He wondered if whomever had been making all that racket had escaped through that window. Impossible. It appeared to be merely decorative, and was just slightly wider than a cereal box.
Which meant that the intruder had to still be in this room—
A sloshing noise behind him. In the mirror above the dresser: a glimpse of wild, bloodshot eyes. A man, moving fast. Something big and box-shaped (and filled with water?) hefted above his head.
Nick turned. Too late.
The CRASH was louder than anything he had ever heard. Felt like a damn planet dropped on top of his skull, as his senses were assaulted by an explosion of wet, stink, and pain.
He fell to one knee beneath a shower of broken glass and foul-smelling water.
“Aww, shit!” said a voice that seemed to come from a million miles away at first. “Not you! What have I done?”
Nick found his way to his feet again. It seemed to take an hour to get there. Broken glass crunched under his weight and the drenched carpet made squishing sounds as he turned to face his attacker. He ran one hand over his buzzcut, and his fingers came away smeared with blood, dirty water, and slimy strings of algae. A gritty rainbow of pink, blue, and purple pebbles was stuck to his palm.
Nick flicked a dead goldfish off his shoulder, and his already-mangled features twisted even further, into a scowl of disbelief.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
Another dead fish went pop! beneath his boot.
“You hit me with an aquarium?”
Nick’s attacker wore nothing but a pair of cut-off jean shorts and enormous plastic-framed glasses that magnified his eyes to cartoonish proportions. His hair fell to his shoulders in a mullet the color of old pennies. His ribs were visible above a sunken stomach that hinted of malnourishment. A few blotchy gray tattoos on his chest and arms resembled some flesh-eating disease that had decided after a little while that this guy just wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Oh, Jeez...Jeezus, I’m...sorry,” he stammered. His teeth were crooked and yellow.
He bolted for the doorway.
Nick lunged for him, but his reflexes weren’t what they used to be. Not to mention the fact that he’d just had a fully-stocked fish tank dropped on his dome. He could feel the cuts in his scalp opening and closing with every move he made, like a hun
dred miniature mouths scolding him for coming here in the first place.
He staggered out of the room, saw a blur of flesh and denim fleeing through the front door.
Concussion or no concussion, no way was he gonna let this crazy fucker out of his sight.
Nick took off after him.
†
He stumbled out the front door and down the porch steps—his bad knee buckled on the last one, but by some miracle he didn’t go down—just in time to see the guy’s bony ass clearing the back corner of the house.
Blood and dirty water dripped from Nick’s earlobes, down his chin. The evening’s cool breeze raised a rash of goosebumps on his wet skin. He fought to keep up, but his sense of balance was off-kilter, and his quarry had gotten a head start of at least a hundred feet.
The guy glanced back over his shoulder before plunging into the woods at the rear of the property.
Nick followed. Low-hanging branches slapped at him like the hands of jilted ex-lovers. Briars tore at his arms.
Then something caught the big man’s eye up ahead. A glint of sunlight off metal.
As he drew closer, he could see what it was: a crooked mobile home in the middle of the woods.
“I just wanna talk to you, fella!” Nick shouted. “Will you hold on a damn second?”
The guy glanced back again, tripped. Ate a faceful of forest floor. He wasted no time getting back to his feet, but in the meantime Nick closed the distance between them by half.
The trees thinned out. Nick followed his quarry onto a plot of red-brown earth adjacent to a corner of that cow pasture he had driven by earlier. In the center of the clearing sat a small green and white singlewide. Looked like it might blow away if someone let loose a powerful sneeze in its vicinity. Its battered aluminum body was speckled all over with patches of rust. Leaning against one side of the trailer was a mud-spattered moped; a dented yellow helmet hung from its handlebars.
Between the east end of the mobile home and the pasture’s barbed-wire fence sat an old doghouse. Judging from the leaf-filled food bowl in its doorway, it had been abandoned for quite some time.
Nick slowed, but continued across the yard. Fought the urge to wince from the pain throbbing through his left knee.
The skinny man paused before a stack of milk crates that were the trailer’s makeshift front steps. He turned to face Nick, and his mouth fell open as if he wanted to say something. But he didn’t.
Nick held one hand out toward him. “Easy, now. I just wanna talk.”
The stranger glanced up at the front door of his trailer. Back at Nick. The door. Nick.
“You just wanna talk?” His sunken chest heaved in and out, in and out. “Promise you’re not gonna hurt me?”
“Make another move like you did at the house, I will defend myself,” said Nick. “Otherwise, I won’t lay a hand on you.”
The man’s bony shoulders slumped. “Hell. Ain’t like I got anywhere to go from here. You might as well come on in.”
He climbed the milk-crate steps, motioned for Nick to follow.
“Welcome to my humble commode, Mr. Bullman. I know it don’t look like much, but it’s home.”
†
The trailer’s foundation creaked and groaned beneath them like some slowly-dying beast. Nick prayed it would hold his weight. Wasn’t too keen on his odds.
The place smelled like mildew, marijuana, cigarettes, and beer. Draped across the back wall of the living room was a massive skull-and-crossbones flag. Beneath the flag sat a babyshit-yellow sofa. Dog-eared Hustler and Heavy Metal magazines covered the surface of a crooked coffee table, along with several empty beer cans, a pack of rolling papers, and an overflowing ashtray shaped like a steer skull. A short bar constructed of cheap particleboard separated the living room from the kitchen. Leaning against the end of the bar was a stereo system with most of its knobs missing and speakers that looked as if they had been mauled by mountain lions.
Nick couldn’t help what he was thinking as he took in his surroundings. This place made his shithole apartment back in Memphis look like the Taj Mahal.
He turned to see the skinny man rummaging through a mountain of dirty clothes in one corner of the living room.
Any worries he might have had about the guy whirling on him with a weapon in hand vanished from his mind as quickly as they came. Despite the stunt with the fish tank, he was pretty sure this fellow was harmless. He could break the weirdo in half if he wanted. Throw him for a mile with little effort. Besides, the other man was so consumed right now with whatever he was doing, it was as if Nick wasn’t even there.
He picked up a pair of crusty-looking jeans, tossed them aside.
Next a pair of brown-streaked underwear flew through the air, landed atop the porn rags on the coffee table.
Nick crossed his arms, raised one gnarled eyebrow. “You wanna tell me what’s going on? And how the hell do you know my name?”
“Wait, I think this is it!” The guy pulled a black T-shirt from the pile of dirty clothes, turned it inside-out. MOTORHEAD, read the logo on the front. “Shit...I know it’s in here somewhere!”
Yet another unwashed article of clothing landed on the floor at Nick’s feet. He stepped back, so it was no longer touching the toe of his boot. Was that a plus-size corset?
“Bingo!”
These days, Nick Bullman went through life with a drooping, lipless mouth that resembled nothing so much as a razor-slit in a piece of raw meat. But he couldn’t help himself: both corners of that slit curled upward into a ghastly grin when he saw what the skinny man had been so eager to show him.
A skull-faced figure leered at him from the front of the shirt. Its hair hung to its waist, and its muscular arms were raised in victory. The demon stood in the middle of a wrestling ring consumed by flames.
The skinny man flipped the shirt around.
THE WIDOWMAKER ATE MY SOUL!!! read the slogan on the back, above a list of cities and tour dates.
“I was there, man. Louisville, Kentucky. Front fuckin’ row! I even got some o’ your blood on me when Father Ivan Ruffstuff threw you outta the ring durin’ your Thumbtacks-and-Broken-Glass Brawl! It was the greatest night of my life!”
Nick barely stifled the deep chuckle that threatened to slip out of him. “What’s your name, fella?”
“Leon. My name’s Leon.” The guy pointed at Nick with one long, filthy-nailed finger. “And you’re Nick Bullman, A.K.A. the Widowmaker.”
“How about you just call me Nick for now?”
“Nick. Right. You got it.” The guy bounced on his heels like a hyperactive child waiting to climb aboard his favorite amusement park ride. “Melissa said you was her pop, but I thought she was pullin’ my dick. I never woulda th—”
“You know Melissa?” Nick interrupted him.
“I mean, we never talked too much, but I’d see her comin’ and goin’. Man, I sure am sorry for hittin’ you like that. You know your head’s still bleedin’? I wish I had some Band-Aids. But I don’t.”
“I’ll live,” said Nick.
“I’m so stupid! I finally get to meet you, and I fuck it up. I can’t do nothin’ right!”
“Forget it. That’s not important right now. Leon, I need you to tell me—”
“You don’t understand, dude. I was your number one fan! I bought all your videos, owned every action figure. I even had the one they discontinued, with your upside-down-cross makeup? Too bad my dog got hold of it. We had this weiner dog when I was a kid, he died chokin’ on it. That thing’d probably be worth, like, a million dollars now! The toy, I mean, not the dog. One time when I was in junior high, my old man beat me up so bad I had to learn how to write left-handed, after he found out I stole thirty bucks outta his wallet. It was worth the ass-whuppin’, though. I needed the dough so I could join your fan club.”
Nick had reached the limits of his patience. “I’m flattered, Leon. I am. But I need to talk to you about the night Eddie Whiteside was murdered. About what happened to Mel
issa’s daughter. You were their closest neighbor. Maybe you saw something that night?”
Leon appeared deeply wounded by Nick’s apathy toward hearing more tales of his lifelong Widowmaker worship. But was there something else in his expression? Nick was quite sure he saw fear in the other man’s eyes as well, at the mention of Eddie’s murder.
“First things first, I need to know what you were doing over there. That house is private property. Not to mention a crime scene, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Leon said nothing for the next minute or so. He just stood there, gnawing at his dirty fingernails. His jittery gaze shot toward the door as if he was considering making another run for it.
Finally, he pulled the Widowmaker shirt over his bony torso and gave a defeated sigh.
“I need a smoke. How about we take a load off, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
To which Nick replied, “Best idea I’ve heard all day.”
†
The kitchen’s linoleum floor might have once been white; now it was piss-colored, scuffed and sticky. A small card table sat in the middle of the room, two folding chairs on either side of it. The tabletop was littered with old fast-food wrappers, dirty dishes, and empty beer cans.
Leon plucked a pack of cigarettes off the bar. Slid a Zippo lighter from the ass pocket of his shorts, lit up. “Can I get you a cold beer?”
He said “cold beer” as if it were one word—coldbeer.
“Why not,” said Nick.
The refrigerator rattled and quaked as Leon opened it up. He scrounged around in there so long Nick started to wonder if he had climbed inside of it to hide. Taped to the fridge’s door was a wrinkled centerfold: a red-headed woman with a lazy eye lay spread-eagle on the floor of an auto-repair shop; with one pink-nailed hand she was inserting a small wrench into a place normally reserved for tools of a more sterile nature.
At last, Leon tossed his hero a can of Milwaukee’s Best.
He plopped down into one of the dented metal chairs at the table.