Cut to the Bone

by Shane Gericke

  “I know I did,” Annie said.

  She turned to Emily. “Mrs. Luerchen has been totally honest about her husband, Detective Thompson,” she said, eyes glittering. “Do you have something equally honest to say in return?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Emily said.

  She moved in close. Began to say Ray wasn’t a goat but a jackass, got his badge from a Cracker Jack box, and his raisin-eyed wife was his pathetic enabler.

  “I wish I hadn’t called him a goat,” she said instead. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Cheryl Beth patted her hand and walked away.

  “‘Be kind to Rayford, Lieutenant,’” Annie cackled as they walked away. “‘He was one of us, Lieutenant. The man got shot, Lieutenant.’“

  “Shut up,” Emily muttered. “Lieutenant.”

  3:22 p.m.

  “All right, ladies and germs,” the water crew chief said, slapping the multi-ton booster pump. The crane that would install it glittered orange in the hazy sun. “We need this bad boy piped, welded, and running by Friday. Folks up and down Royce Road are complaining about low water pressure, and this’ll give ‘em what they need.”

  The crane operator lifted his long metal boom to a forty-five-degree angle.

  “What they need, Larry,” the foreman said, laughing. “Not what they want.”

  5:41 p.m.

  Emily dove behind cover, rolled twice, shouldered the rifle, pulled the trigger, felt the buck, and leapt to her feet, muzzle wobbling with every wheeze.

  “Again.”

  Roll-blam.

  “Again.”

  Roll-blam.

  “Again.”

  Roll-blam.

  “Again.”

  “You’re killing me!” Emily howled.

  “Better here than the street,” Annie snapped in the whip-tone she employed as a U.S. Army sniper instructor. “Again.”

  Emily did thirty to her right and fifty to her left, then collapsed.

  “Well, you wanted to scratch Mrs. Ray from your brain, right?” Annie said, squatting next to her. “No better way to do that than shooting.”

  “What shooting?” Emily groaned, clutching the ultralight combat rifle. Annie was testing it as a replacement for shotguns in patrol cars. “I’m hopping around like a bullfrog.”

  She’d been plowing through task force paperwork since the funeral. Devlin Bloch still wasn’t talking, and no new leads had surfaced. Then came the Luerchens. Then Marty, who’d barely said a word since leaving the funeral. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. “Nothing,” he’d replied. “Just tired.” Angering her because she knew it so untrue. It was one thing to keep something from her. Now he was lying directly.

  Annie stopped by to update Branch on Friday’s security plan. Noted Emily’s hunched-over grumpiness. Conferred with him, then told her, “Follow me.”

  Next stop, gun range.

  “This isn’t frog-jumping, girl,” Annie snorted. “It’s high-speed low-drag tactical ninja operator training. How you gonna be Robocop if you refuse to learn the lingo?”

  “Don’t wanna be Robocop,” Emily said. She handed over the Kel-Tec SU-16CA, then sat against the wall to flap the Guns n’ Roses T-shirt. “I just wanna shoot Ray for haunting me from the grave.”

  Annie looked at her strangely.

  “Sorry,” Emily said. “Bad taste.”

  “No such thing when it comes to Ray,” Annie said. “But I hear more than our un-dearly departed in that statement. What’s wrong?”

  Emily waved it off. “Nothing. Let’s just get back to-”

  “Tell me, Detective. That’s an order.”

  Emily sighed, flopped back to the floor. “All right. I’m worried.”

  “About?”

  “Marty.”

  A pair of traffic cops walked in. “Come back later, all right?” Annie said. They sensed it wasn’t a request, and left. Annie locked the door, sat cross-legged against the wall.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I think he’s seeing someone,” Emily said. “A woman named Alice.”

  “Oy,” Annie said. “All right, tell me everything. From the beginning.”

  Emily shifted around. “He’s been moody lately,” she said. “Quiet.”

  “He’s the strong silent type,” Annie said. “About personal stuff, anyway.”

  “Not when we’re alone,” Emily said. “Not once in our two years together. We’ve talked about our marriages. Our spouses’ deaths. Rebuilding the house. Living together, living separately, all of it.” She wiped hair off her face. “But all of a sudden he’s shutting himself off.”

  “Completely?”

  “Oh, no,” Emily said. “You wouldn’t even notice if I hadn’t told you. Ninety-nine percent of the time he’s his normal happy self.” She blew the drop of sweat off the tip of her nose. “But the other percent, his face gets that foggy look. Like he’s lost in thought. His attention drifts. I ask him about it, and he changes the subject.”

  “Maybe it’s the execution,” Annie ventured. “He’s lived with that rotten case for seventeen years, Em. Now that the end is near, maybe he’s depressed.”

  “That’s what I assumed,” Emily said, shaking her head. “So I asked. He insists nothing’s wrong. But I know better. He’s hiding something.” Her eyes brimmed, and she told Annie about the secret phone call to “Alice,” the lame “snitch” excuse he’d used to cover the others, and the several unexplained disappearances he’d made in the middle of the night. “I think he’s fallen in love with this Alice woman, and he doesn’t know how to tell me.”

  She wiped her face with her shirttail.

  “I fell in love with him practically overnight, you know,” she said. “A year went by and it just got better. I finally started believing we were that million-to-one shot that was meant to be. Marty believed it, too.”

  “He still does,” Annie said.

  Emily fiddled with her wedding ring, then realized it wasn’t there. She’d removed it a year ago, when Marty finally replaced her dead husband Jack as her heart-mate.

  “But maybe we were just safe shelter for each other,” she continued. “You know, an escape from all that tragedy. And now that it’s over he’s met someone and wants to dump me . . .”

  The tears spilled.

  “No way, hon,” Annie said, shaking her head so hard the blond ringlets danced. “Marty’s nuts about you. No way he’d take a hike, and he’s too damn noble to sneak around. Besides, Branch would let me know in his special guy way if there was trouble in paradise.”

  “How’s that?”

  “‘Hey, Annie, there’s, uh, trouble in paradise,’” she mimicked.

  They both laughed.

  “So you don’t think he wants out,” Emily said. “Or that there’s another woman.”

  “I read people pretty well, and I just don’t see it,” Annie said, shaking her head. “But you say he’s hiding something. Particularly this Alice, whoever the hell she is. Hmm.” She perched her chin on her small fists, thinking. “Does he refuse to talk about it? Or does he talk about it without saying anything, then move to safer topics?”

  Emily tapped her nose.

  “Oh, hell, my husband does that all the time,” Annie said. “I have to keep steering him back to the point when he’s telling me something he thinks I don’t want to hear. Didn’t Jack do that?”

  Emily shook her head. “Jack told me everything on his mind. Everything. Precisely and to the point, the minute it occurred to him.”

  “Was that good or bad?”

  “Good.” Her ears colored. “Though sometimes I wished he’d just, uh, you know . . .”

  “Shut the hell up.”

  “Yeah,” Emily admitted. “When he died, I was so ashamed of those thoughts I couldn’t stand myself. Now I want Marty to open up that way, and he isn’t.”

  “Two men,” Annie said. “Two ways of dealing.”

  “I know,” Emily said. “And that’s fine by me - everybody’s d
ifferent. But this isn’t just ‘dealing.’ Something’s bothering him terribly, and he doesn’t want to tell me. Something about him and this Alice.”

  “So bug him till he comes clean.”

  Emily looked at her.

  “Cans of worms and sleeping dogs,” Annie said. “I get it, hon. But if it bothers you this much, you need to take the risk. Can’t fix a sink till you know where it leaks.” She covered her mouth, yawned mightily.

  “Up late last night, were we?”

  Annie grinned. “If you must know, hubby was the principal and I was the naughty student . . .”

  “Stop!” Emily said, slapping her hands to her ears. “That image will ruin me for life!”

  Annie’s laugh was full-throat. She walked to the gun safe, spun the dial, pulled out a violin case. “Because you did such a good job today,” she said, flipping the brass latches, “I’m going to let you shoot my Tommy gun.”

  “Holy cow!” Emily said, scrambling to her feet. She knew all about the legendary Thompson Sub-Machine Gun - aka tommy gun, chopper, gat, and Chicago typewriter - from endless hours of watching The Untouchables with her dad. But she’d never seen, much less fired, Al Capone’s equalizer. “Where on earth did you get it?”

  “Aforementioned darling hubby,” Annie said, holding it up. The 1928 Full Automatic gleamed from Cutts compensator to finned barrel to oiled walnut stock to signature drum magazine holding fifty fat rounds of .45 ACP.

  “God, it’s beautiful,” Emily moaned, running her finger along the polished blued steel.

  “I’ve wanted one since I was a kid,” Annie said, ensuring the chamber was empty. “A genuine tommy from the Roaring Twenties, not a reproduction. Unbeknownst to me, he searched for three years till he found this. Rusty and dented, but real. He sent it to an expert for full restoration and gave it to me last night as an early birthday present. I was thrilled.”

  Only Annie would prefer machine guns to diamonds! “So that’s why you volunteered for the principal’s office,” Emily said, grinning.

  “Would I wear a plaid skirt and Mary Janes otherwise?” Annie demanded. “Here.”

  Emily blinked in astonishment as she accepted the weapon. The Kel-Tec weighed five pounds. This beast topped twelve.

  “Fourteen-point-four with ammunition,” Annie said, correctly interpreting Emily’s expression. “They used to make guns like Sherman tanks.”

  “Hurray for progress,” Emily said, sighting down the barrel. “I wouldn’t want to lug this an hour, let alone all day.”

  “Me neither,” Annie said. She nodded at the Osama bin Laden target at the end of the shooting lane. “Cock the bolt and let ‘er rip. Remember it’s full automatic and it’s going to jump.”

  Emily nodded, re-donned her ear and eye protection, aimed, and pulled the stiff trigger. The tommy chattered. Four seconds later the drum was empty, white smoke curling toward Osama’s blown-out turban.

  “Wheeeee!” she said, laughing.

  “There’s a lot to dislike about the old days of police work,” Annie said, handing her a second dram. “Racism and sexism. Routine brutality. Lousy pay and low professional standards. But man they had a good time shooting.” She coached Emily through the loading procedure. “I’m going to make you an expert with Mister T.”

  “What’s the point?” Emily said, patting her two-pound Glock.

  “Same reason you carry fresh undies in your purse. ‘Cause you never know.”

  7:42 p.m.

  “May I offer you a cocktail, sir?” the flight attendant asked.

  The Executioner looked up. There’d been an opening in first class, and he’d happily upgraded. Coach was as cramped as the electric chair, and almost as deadly to the body.

  “Well, it is after five,” he said, nodding at the striking brunette whose nametag read JAIME. The smooth-talking pilot was James, he’d learned in the post-takeoff announcement. A cute coincidence. He wondered if they called each other Jim in the galley. “Tell me, Jaime, how much longer till we land in Chicago?”

  The attendant tonged ice cubes into a glass and trickled them with Maker’s Mark. The ice made a crackling sound that pleased the Executioner. “Thanks to strong tailwinds, we’re ahead of schedule,” she said. “We should be at O’Hare in seventy minutes, instead of ninety. If that changes, I’ll let you know right away.”

  “No need,” the Executioner said, settling back and sipping velvet. “I don’t have to be anywhere till morning.”

  JANUARY 14, 1968

  “Having been found guilty of thirteen counts of murder, the sentence of this court is death by electrocution,” the judge said.

  “Gee, what a shock,” Earl Monroe said back.

  The judge banged the gavel. The bailiffs and Covington glared. Earl didn’t care.

  They could only kill him once.

  Tuesday

  5:45 a.m.

  Emily rounded the final curve, long legs pumping furiously. She’d decided during the backstretch to take Annie’s advice, and the relief that brought made the last mile easy.

  She sprinted up the long hill of her backyard. Geese honked furiously as they scattered out of her way. Emily honked back. A minute later, she did a somersault on the concrete slab that would someday be a brick-and-cypress deck, then bounded through her back door.

  In the gloom of a picnic shelter several hundred yards away, the Executioner smiled as he followed her through binoculars.

  “The papers were right, Detective,” he murmured, patting the handmade knife in his jacket. “You still take the same route every morning. See you tomorrow.”

  7:18 a.m.

  Johnny Sanders crunched his whole-wheat toast, blinking at the glare off his backyard shed.

  “Another day in paradise,” he said. Meaning it. He liked summer, even though Springfield got as sticky as Malaysia with humidity.

  He reached for the mug of decaf, skim milk, and Sweet ‘n Low. Poor man’s cappuccino. It made almost bearable the fiber flakes his doctor insisted he start eating instead of his beloved pigs in a blanket.

  He turned to the state-by-state roundup in USA Today, the first of two newspapers he devoured with breakfast. He’d lived a lot of places growing up as an air force brat, and enjoyed seeing items from familiar datelines.

  Los Angeles - LAPD refused comment on reports that roses were lodged in the throat of Sage Farri, 19, found dead in his hospital room Sunday. Farri, recovering from knee surgery from a sports injury, was discovered by nursing staff. . . .

  “Only in Hollywood,” Sanders said, shaking his head.

  He finished USA Today, then turned to the hometown State Journal-Register, smiling in anticipation. The reporter had e-mailed last night, saying her story would appear today as part of the special section, “Drumbeat to Death.”

  And there it was.

  “A heartless pile of concrete on a moat of compressed garbage, with the narrow windows, flat roof, and crenelated snarl of a fourteenth-century battle-castle,” she called the Justice Center. “Captain Ahab,” she called Governor Covington. “The electric chair’s crash test dummy,” she called Johnny Sanders.

  Cool beans!

  He’d leave this open for his wife and make sure the guys at the office saw it. When was the last time a state historian was called a crash test dummy?

  “Probably never,” he said to the story.

  He read it twice more, then turned the page to read the Associated Press follow-up about two fatal shootings - one in a spa, the other in a roadside park - Friday in Naperville.

  “Hey, I was just there,” he told their ancient cat. The orange tabby eyeballed him, went back to gumming her tuna.

  Sanders sipped a little cappuccino, read deeper.

  “Zabrina Reynolds,” he murmured. “Hmm. That name rings a bell.” He ran through everyone he knew - work, family, friends, church, stores, bowling league, the thousands of execution documents he strained his eyeballs to absorb - but couldn’t place it.

  Oh, well. It’s n
ot important.

  He finished the news section with the obituary for Frank Mahoney III, grandson of a popular dentist who decamped from Springfield in the 1970s for Holbrook, Arizona.

  The write-up included a black-and-white photo from a 1969 feature about Springfield businessmen who sponsored youth baseball. Grandpa Frank was one of them. He was the spitting image of his dead grandson. It prompted a pang of sympathy. For the victims, and for himself. Like the bran and skim milk, these stories were little reminders he wasn’t getting any younger.

  Dismissing the thoughts as maudlin, he turned to sports for the preseason reports. Springfield High football looked awfully impressive. Maybe the Senators would catch fire this year. . . .

  7:37 a.m.

  “About time,” Gene Mason growled.

  “What’s that, Chief?” his secretary asked, poking her head through the door.

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said, motioning for her to ignore him. “I was yelling at the feds again.”

  She smiled sweetly, went back to her typing.

  Mason had been trying to log onto NCIC since Saturday. First the site was down for maintenance. Then it plain didn’t work. Monday, he telephoned the help desk. Whoever answered said there’d been a glitch and “it’ll be up and running by noon today.”

  Which it wasn’t.

  But all of a sudden it was, and he started trolling for matches.

  10:30 a.m.

  “I’d put one team here,” Emily said, trying not to limp as she walked along the main gate of the State of Illinois Justice Center in Naperville. “Another there, two more there. Then bring in every water cannon the Fire Department can spare.”

  Marty added the recommendations to his notes. “That’s it?”

  Emily mulled all the ways a protester could climb, tunnel, or sneak through the towering fence around what used to be the Greene Valley Landfill. Nodded. “No way they’ll get past.”

  “They do,” Marty said. “Covington hangs Cross from the nearest tree.”

  Emily knew about the ugly argument on I-55 because Branch told Marty, and Marty told her. “He’s still miffed about a difference of opinion?”