The Keepers

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  Vira and I spun around. A lump stuck in my throat.

  Kippy had gone for it in one gymnastic routine instead of breaking it into separate chunks. Her lower half—from the rump down—hung out of the now-open kitchen window. No one boating past could misinterpret that implication. Vira and I raced across the dirt and weeds, a Doppler of boat motor in the background. Kippy, tipped-off by the outboard, scampered like hell, her butt now inside, her legs sticking out. I shoved the bottom of her shoes inward as hard as I could before diving behind the cabin with Vira. I scurried to the other side, peeked about the corner, staring out at Rock Lake.

  Both chubs and thinner were out of the tree line, both boat and fishermen now in clear view. Thinner was chuckling at something chubs must have said. Both faced inland, gazing indifferently at Feist’s stacked dock. And then they were gone … seemingly on their way to a hopefully more prosperous fishing hole.

  CHAPTER 39

  “Are you okay?” I stepped quickly over a rotting front step and through the front door Kippy had opened for me, closing it once inside.

  “No worries,” she said. “My forehead broke the fall.”

  “Oh, god—I am so sorry.”

  “The alternative is I ice it at county lockup while we wait for Callum’s men to come for us.”

  I circled the room. Though Feist’s shack was hardly the Ritz-Carlton on the outside, the inside was even worse. The refrigerator must have come over on the Mayflower. The kitchen sink had seen more utility gutting fish than scrubbing dishes. And a dead stench wafted up from the drain. Kippy should get a tetanus shot for sliding over it on her flight in, I thought. The kitchen table looked decent enough, top-of-the-line Goodwill circa 1965. The sofa was clearly salvaged from the Hindenburg, post-explosion. Even the finest vacuum that Kirby had to offer could never make the carpet look as though it should not immediately be set ablaze. Mold and mildew ran a dead heat as to which could cause more nausea.

  Of course we didn’t have to worry about Feist having the place rigged with an alarm system. The system itself would cost more than anything worth stealing.

  “I may know why the wife and kids don’t bother coming.” I flicked a light switch on and off several times. “There’s no power.”

  Kippy opened the fridge door and shut it rapidly. “Evidently not.”

  “Excellent.”

  “We need to air this place out.” Kippy began opening windows, the ones opposite the kitchen and above the couch, ones that also couldn’t be spotted from the lake.

  I leaned against the sink and gave a quick whistle. I peeled the front door curtain back a half-inch and peeked out. The coast was clear, so I opened the door ten inches and let Vira and the girls squeeze in. I checked the cupboards, realized Feist was my kind of guy, and retrieved three paper bowls. I set them in a line on the floor and emptied a bottle of water equally among the three dishes.

  Kippy had disappeared into the single bedroom and now returned. “A couple of bunk beds and pillows, no sheets. And a fossilized mouse in a trap, so I don’t think he’s been here on any overnights in quite a while.” She pointed at the only other room that made up Feist’s lake home. “There’s a toilet, a shower, and a sink, but the water’s turned off.”

  “I’ll try and rustle up some light.”

  On the far wall near the corner of the room, at face-level, was a wooden cabinet, maybe five inches wide, with a copper latch. I opened it and found what I was looking for. The small cabinet acted as a shell for the electrical service panel—the fuse box. I opened the hinged cover. Considering the size of Feist’s cabin, it was a basic unit. I flipped the main breaker.

  “Try now.”

  Kippy flicked the light switch on and off, shook her head, and said, “We don’t need it, Mace. With the side curtains open, there’s enough natural light coming in.”

  I picked up a cardboard box from the bottom ledge of the cabinet. The box contained enough fuses to replace any blown ones a dozen times over.

  “We don’t need to fix his electrical, Mace. Remember, come night, the last thing we need is for neighbors to notice that lights are on.”

  I put the box of fuses back where I’d found it, shut the cabinet, and then pulled the sofa away from the wall. My unearthing included an old pack of Bicycle playing cards and another dead mouse in a trap—just fur and bone—fossilized, like the one Kippy had found in the bedroom. I tossed the mouse, trap and all, in the bin under the sink—so the dogs couldn’t get at it—and did the same with the trapped remains from the bedroom. These forgotten mousetraps didn’t bode well for the special prosecutor having been here any time in the recent past.

  Then I tackled what I’d been putting off, flipped the cushions off the couch, grimaced—focused my mind on Kippy’s banging about the bathroom, removing tank lids and opening medicine cabinets—and stuck my hand deep inside the crease and slid my fingers across the inner crevice of Feist’s sofa, the back and both sides.

  All I came away with was a long string of fish line and what I hoped were only coagulated cough drops. I wasn’t even able to scrape together loose change for my trouble.

  Kippy came into the room holding a broom she’d found somewhere and stared up at the ceiling. I followed suit. The cabin’s ceiling ran parallel to the eaves—a flat surface of rustic pine, possibly the original tongue-and-groove boarding. Kippy used the tip of the broom shaft to tap the ceiling boards in case any were unfastened or contained some kind of hidden compartment that Feist may have utilized.

  I pulled a kitchen chair to the center of the room, under the singular light fixture—realizing we were quickly running out of places to search—when the idea occurred to me. I walked back, opened the wall cabinet, and grabbed the cardboard box containing the fuses.

  “Really, Mace,” Kippy said, “it’s not as though we’re going to cook a Thanksgiving dinner or anything.”

  Considering the supplies I’d picked up at the Beloit Walmart—trail mix and beef jerky—a Thanksgiving dinner it would most certainly not be.

  “I know,” I said, turning her way and running a hand through the various fuses. Flipping the main breaker had pretty much exhausted the extent of my electrical knowledge, but if Kippy thought I was bright enough to be an electrician, who was I to contradict her.

  Besides, I had something else in mind.

  “I’ll check the light fixtures and the kitchen, and you rip apart the bedroom, okay?”

  “Sure,” I replied, still peering inside the box. I noticed a fleck of purple at the bottom of the fuse carton. I shook the container, like panning for gold, until I saw more purple. It was relatively thin, maybe a couple inches long, with a black cap.

  “You okay, Mace?”

  I reached inside, pulled out the item—which was definitely not a fuse—and held it in front of my face.

  “What’s that?”

  I looked at Kippy and we both spoke as one.

  “Flash drive.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “No shit? Callum wants the dog-fucker’s eyes?”

  “The man was not pleased with how things went down at City Hall,” Cordov Woods replied to Frank Cappelli Jr., keeping his eyes focused on I-94 west. Young Cappelli indeed rode shotgun in the Lincoln Continental while Jethro chewed a bushel of Twizzlers in the back seat.

  “So he’s sending a message, huh?”

  “Not really, since we’re disappearing them. You know, the crematorium.” There was a cremation service they used in Skokie. In fact, it was a service Cappelli’s father, Frank Sr., once brought to their attention, and it was where the three IKEA boxes were intended to be sent had recent events not gone south. “He’s just big-time pissed off.”

  “And you want me to do the job, right?” Cappelli Jr. asked. “Cut the fucker’s eyes out?”

  Woods nodded. “I’ve a weak constitution.”

  “What’s that mean? Like bill of rights and shit?”

  “I think it means he’s got a weak stomach,” Jethro piped in thr
ough red teeth, the first words he’d spoken since young Cappelli had joined them for the road trip.

  “Fuck you, geek,” Cappelli Jr. said over a shoulder and looked at Woods. “I call bullshit. I know stuff about you, Cordov, and you ain’t got no weak stomach. I bet your ancestors wore black hoods and lobbed off heads. It’s in your blood.”

  “You won’t do it?”

  “Hell yeah I’ll do it. You assholes made my day by showing up.”

  Woods nodded again.

  “Can’t wait to see how Goldy’ll work on eyeballs.”

  Goldy was Cappelli’s pet name for the pair of brass knuckles he sometimes used; knuckles with a razor-sharp spearhead in front. Woods knew he himself had issues shrinks would have a field day deciphering, but Frank Cappelli Jr.—Jesus Christ—the man got his rocks off inflicting pain on others. Cappelli Jr. not only embraced his sadistic streak but rolled about and frolicked in the meadow with it. Cordov Woods took care of Superintendent Callum’s dirty work, had done so for years, but left to his own devices Woods went for the quick kill except on those occasions, like today, when Callum demanded extra.

  And Callum had been demanding extra more and more of late.

  Woods looked sideways at Cappelli Jr. Frankly, he detested the spoiled little shit, but daddy’s name was Frank Cappelli Sr., so Woods placated the kid, tried to reason with him, hoping against hope some semblance of rational thought might rub off on him. And Woods did consider how he’d won a minor victory some months back in the battle over leaving punctured corpses strewn about Chicago for medical examiners to comb over, because if Cappelli Jr. were ever arrested with Goldy on his person, the spiked brass knuckles would tie him to a fistful of Windy City killings up to and including that union negotiator the kid had been dumb enough to torch, thinking a warehouse fire would cover up a killing. Dead men do tell tales after all, but the disappeared dead—the cremated dead—do not. Woods recalled the conversation he’d had with young Cappelli, where he spoke in the most basic of terms he’d hoped the young psychopath would comprehend.

  “Remember the movie Home Alone?” Woods asked him over beers.

  “I fucking love that movie,” Cappelli Jr. had replied.

  “Remember how one of the burglars left the water running in all the homes they robbed?”

  “Yeah—they called themselves the Wet Bandits.”

  “Remember when they got caught, how the police were able to tie all the flooded-home burglaries to them?”

  Woods thought he spotted a spark of understanding in young Cappelli’s eyes.

  “Oh … fuck,” Cappelli Jr. had said.

  Since then, the crematorium in Skokie had received repeat business.

  Woods figured Cappelli Jr. was a good-enough-looking kid—black hair slicked back, medium height, muscular, a snazzy dresser. Yup, the kid could probably have been a men’s clothing model except for one distinguishing factor: young Cappelli had a cleft lip or, more insultingly labeled, a harelip. There’d been surgery when the kid was an infant, but a light scar remained visible. However, the overriding rule of hanging out with young Cappelli, and he’d stressed this with Jethro on their ride over to pick up Cappelli Jr., was don’t acknowledge the harelip in any manner, shape, or form. Don’t look at the harelip, don’t talk about the harelip, and, if you’re fond of your time spent cavorting about on planet Earth, never ever joke about the harelip. Woods had heard tell that Cappelli Jr. once used his precious Goldy to carve a harelip into some numbskull who’d made an offhand and unflattering remark concerning young Cappelli’s most-dominant facial characteristic before stuffing said numbskull—still alive and kicking—into the Skokie crematorium.

  Woods’s cell phone buzzed. He drove with a knee and checked the text message. Security found Reid’s truck at O’Hare.

  “Looks like the dog man dumped his Ford at the airport,” he announced to the car.

  “What’s he driving now?” young Cappelli asked.

  “They don’t know yet,” Woods said. “Guess we’ll find out at Rock Lake.”

  CHAPTER 41

  “You look more pregnant than fat.”

  “Thanks,” Kippy replied. “I guess.”

  We’d squished and molded and duct-taped a pillow from one of the bunk beds to Kippy’s midsection. It took a while to get it just right before she slid on one of Wabiszewski’s sweatshirts. Before that, Kippy had me cut her hair with a pair of rusty scissors we’d found in a kitchen drawer where Feist kept his fillet knives. I gently held the dark locks in the back and cut them at middle-of-the-neck level. I could never moonlight at a hair salon, but Kippy seemed to think I’d done a passable job. She then used half a case of bottled water to wash her hair, accompanying the aqua with little bottles of shampoo and conditioner that she’d liberated from our motel in Rockford. After that she pushed everything back with her fingertips and let it dry.

  “You don’t look anything like yourself.”

  “No one should look twice at a woman in her third trimester,” Kippy said, “and think it’s the fugitive lady from the news.”

  After discovering the flash drive, we’d gotten reenergized and continued ransacking the rest of Feist’s shack. It didn’t take long. Kippy took apart the kitchen and rechecked the main room while I tackled the bedroom and double-checked the bathroom. When we were done—and nothing had been found—we switched areas and I knocked about the kitchen and main room while Kippy tore apart the rest of the cabin.

  Nothing additional had been discovered and we called it quits.

  Kippy asked, “Do you think Paul’s called the truck in yet?”

  I had given this a lot of thought. Paul would know my working for a Mexican drug cartel was a joke—complete bullshit—as was my killing of Officer Dave Wabiszewski. Plus, Paul knew all about Vira, about her special ability. “I think he’s going to buy us as much time as possible without sinking himself.”

  “You know they’re drilling through our colleagues, friends, and family,” Kippy said. “They’ve probably already talked to him.”

  “Paul will tell them he doesn’t buy the news reports—that there’s no way I’m running around Chicago like some kind of crazed fiend—but they can knock themselves out looking around CACC. Hopefully, they don’t know enough yet to brace him on the vehicles.”

  The last we’d heard on the CACC truck’s radio, they were still reporting the plates off my F-150. And Paul was cagey; I pictured him covering himself, leaving messages on my answering service, begging me to get a lawyer and turn myself in. Perhaps tomorrow he’d call the local police about the missing truck. If he did, hopefully it’d take another day for Callum’s forces to catch wind and realize exactly what the missing truck meant.

  “You know we stick out like a sore thumb in that dog mobile.”

  “When you get near the frontage road, pull over and check the radio,” I said. “If they’re jumping up and down about the CACC truck, come right back and we’ll figure out something else.”

  The something we’d already figured out was that a pregnant, short-haired Kippy would walk into the Lake Mills Public Library, feed the librarian whatever line of BS it’d take to use one of their computers without an ID or library card, find out what Peter Feist had on the flash drive, and then come right back so we could plot our next move. If Feist had something good on the flash drive—something to lawfully kick Callum and Weeks in the nuts—our next move would basically be noodling out the smartest method in which to share Feist’s content with the media and the FBI.

  Of course, if the flash drive contained only images of the various walleyes and largemouth bass Peter Feist had pulled out of Rock Lake … then we were shit out of luck.

  CHAPTER 42

  “The library?” the gas station clerk stared at Kippy as though she’d asked him which aisle contained gold bullion. “Can’t you bring that up on your cell phone?”

  Kippy had done as Mace had suggested, parked and listened to news reports on the CACC truck’s radio before turning
onto the paved road that both circled the lake and connected with the highway leading back to town. The latest update repeated that Mason Reid’s Ford F-150 pickup had been discovered by security in long-term parking at O’Hare International Airport, but, fortunately, there was still no all-points bulletin regarding the two of them making good on their escape in a glorified dog-catching mobile … thank you Paul Lewis.

  “I left it at home,” Kippy lied. Cheap burner phones tend not to come with a wide assortment of applications.

  “Ardith,” the clerk called to his coworker who manned the neighboring cash register, “do you know where the library is?”

  Since it hadn’t appeared the authorities were yet on the lookout for the CACC truck, Kippy had topped off the tank as she didn’t know when the opportunity might arise again should that status change. She figured the twenty bucks in premium would score her a quick set of directions from one of the townies.

  Evidently, Ardith didn’t give two shits about Kippy’s purchase of premium gasoline as she shook her head as though brushing away a cloud of gnats and continued ringing up her current customer’s box of donuts, bag of chips, and large Slurpee. It didn’t appear either gas station clerk was willing to take out their own smartphone in order to assist in her quest … certainly not Ardith. So much for the notion that people will bend over backward to help those with child.

  Kippy would have pressed the point were she not wanted for murder.

  As it turned out, the hardest part of the trip to Lake Mills Public Library was finding the damned place to begin with.

  “Try Maggie at the café,” the proud new owner of gas station donuts, overpriced chips, and a Slurpee informed her. “She always reads books on breaks or whenever it’s dead.”