Serpents in the Cold

by Thomas O'Malley

  “Why’d you run?” Dante asked.

  “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Who?”

  A dog was barking wildly from the wrecker’s yard, and as their breathing calmed, Cal could also hear a dump truck rumbling along the Mile Road.

  “Tell us who and he won’t hurt you.”

  He shook his head vigorously, his cracked lips peeled back over yellowed teeth.

  “We’re here looking for something,” Cal said. “A friend of ours—a woman—she went missing and ended up dead. We’re trying to find what happened to her, okay?” Cal stared into the man’s eyes and, slowly, the man nodded.

  Cal rose off the man and now realized how bedraggled and small he was. He wore two coats, a soiled sheepskin vest under his olive horsehair jacket and a sweater beneath that. He’d struggled like an animal but without the heavy clothes would probably weigh very little. Cal reached out his hand. “C’mon, get up.”

  Reluctantly, the man took his hand and Cal pulled him to his feet.

  Cal touched a hand to the side of his face where blood had hardened and winced when he pressed against the top of his brow.

  “What’s your name?” Dante asked.

  “J.J. They call me J.J.”

  “You live in that trailer?”

  “Me and about eight others. People come and go, y’know, but mostly there’s about eight others.”

  They trudged back across the snow toward the trailers. The sky had darkened and the temperature began to plummet. The snow cracked sharply beneath their feet. Tired now, they moved slowly, their breath smoking the air before them.

  “About our friend,” Dante said. “When we mentioned her you gave up the fight. You thought we were someone else.”

  J.J. lowered his head. “I thought you were here for the trailer.”

  “What about the trailer?”

  “I’m not going in there. I saw it once, I don’t need to see it again.”

  “What did you see?”

  “You go over there and find out for yourself.”

  Cal reached out and gripped J.J’s sleeve. “What the fuck did you see?”

  “A guy comes with the trailer, he drops it off here. He drives around and picks them up and then brings them back here so he can do what he likes.”

  “Do what he likes?”

  “To women. He likes to hurt women.”

  “Who?”

  “A big tall guy. Real nasty-looking. Kill you as soon as look at you.”

  “Did he have a fucked-up mouth, a harelip?”

  J.J. shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see that.”

  “When was he last here?”

  “He mostly comes at night. In the morning the trailer’s always gone again. This time he left the trailer sitting here.”

  “For how long?”

  J.J. paused, licked at his chapped lips. “Don’t know my days anymore. Three days maybe?”

  “Which trailer?” Cal asked.

  J.J. turned around and pointed to a trailer toward the end of the lot.

  “You got a crowbar, something that can snap the chain?”

  “I got one inside.”

  J.J.’s trailer had a makeshift chimney jutting out from the center of the roof. It was made from rusted sheet metal, and black smoke funneled from it and broke apart in the heavy winds. “We light a fire,” he said. “Keep it in a barrel and put a pipe through the roof so’s we don’t die in our sleep. No one ever bothers us over here and we keep to ourselves.”

  J.J. opened the trailer doors and faces swam out of the dark at them, misshapen in the orange glow of the red flames flickering from a trash barrel at the center of the floor. J.J. waved his hands in a settling motion, told them everything was all right, and they inched backward into the dark. Here and there men lay curled beneath bits of blanket and cardboard and rags. Dante and Cal could smell them, and the heat of them huddled together. Wind banged against the side of the trailer and rippled the thin sheet metal roof. In the dark all they could make out were slivers of raw face, a gleam of broken teeth, protuberant, bulging eyes, as the residents of the trailer moved farther back into the shadows. J.J. nodded and clambered deeper into his trailer. After a moment he reappeared with a tire iron.

  “I’m not giving you this,” he said. “We need it for protection. And I’m not seeing a thing. I’m not here.”

  “You’re not here, okay, I got it. Give me the fucking bar, would you?”

  J.J. handed him the tire iron.

  After the exertion of the chase, Cal’s leg was stiffening and it had begun to throb with pain so that he had to walk slower than he would have liked. As they walked the row, Cal considered the dented and hollowed sheet metal sides, the snow that had accumulated in drifts between them, the threadbare tires and rusted wheels—wheels that hadn’t moved in months but for one, the one that he knew belonged to a red and green Peterbilt. He’d seen the same frozen, ridged tracks along Tenean Beach.

  The doors were padlocked. Dante pulled at the lock but it didn’t budge. Dante watched as Cal leveraged the bar between the lock and the frame. Cal grunted and the lock shattered. He opened the trailer doors and they felt the ice cold of its interior and the sense of its frozen cargo like a weight pushing out at them. Coughing, he and Dante clambered up into the trailer. Cal banged his fist hard against his thigh, working the blood, trying to get the muscle moving again.

  Inside the truck, carcasses of meat hung darkly from hooks, shuddering slightly as wind buffeted the chassis. Heavy drapes of sheer vinyl the color of dog piss separated the trailer into compartments of different meats, kept its insides even colder. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dim light; their breath steamed slowly in the half dark. Between two pale ribbed halves of cow lay the shreds of a torn dress, a woman’s underthings: blue panties, the elastic waistband shredded, a white brassiere. A worn leather purse with tarnished clasps. Spooled in a small heap a gold crucifix and chain that made Dante pause. He reached down, held it in his hand, turned it over. After a moment he said, “It’s Sheila’s.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Margo gave it to her. She gave me one just like it.” Holding the crucifix by its chain, he placed it back on the floor, let the chain loop over the cross. His chest felt tight and he fought to measure his breathing, but when he looked around at the hanging carcasses of meat, he could only see Sheila strung up, her arms raised and bound over one of the steel hooks, causing the ligature marks that Fierro had mentioned.

  Cal crouched on his haunches, parted the clothing, and surveyed the ground. Blood spatter had turned the metal black. Dante knelt down beside him, touched the clothing he assumed was Sheila’s, clutched the things in his hands, and then, strangely ashamed, dropped them back to the floor. When he stood, the tendons in his knees cracked.

  Wind banged against the metal sides of the trailer, and the metal warped and bent and popped as if they were underwater and sinking deeper and deeper. Still on his knees, Cal cupped his hands to his mouth and tried to blow some warmth into them.

  The trailer was a crime scene now. Sooner or later, he knew that they’d have to call Owen, something he didn’t want to do until he and Dante had a little more to go on. Dante glanced at him and fumbled in his pockets for his lighter and cigarettes. He lit one and kept the lighter ablaze.

  Beyond the hanging carcasses, shadows seemed to blur and tremble. Cal paused and held his breath, squinted through the rows of chains and meat, in the way he’d once stared and waited in the suspended light of a foreign dusk, waited for the enemy’s approach. What the hell was he seeing?

  The sounds of the dump yards were gone. Even the seagulls had gone silent. Only the soft rattling and metal tones of the lanyards and chains against the empty gleaming hooks and the softly swaying carcasses of cow.

  They moved forward toward a thicker darkness, parting first one vinyl curtain and then another. Outside the wind thrust frozen snow beneath the trailer and it rattled and pin
ged beneath their feet. They parted the last curtain. Before them, the bodies of three women hung from meat hooks, their mouths in the final rictus of a terrible and tortured death, blood black on their frozen blue-hued skin. Cal put a hand to his mouth and turned away, but the image of them remained, of their splayed and contorted hips and their distended, naked bodies. Dante dropped his lighter and reached for him but Cal pushed his hand away. He was trying to find his way in the dark, and the sense of bodies pushed in on him so that he couldn’t breathe. He stepped through the vinyl sheets and moved toward the trailer’s doors, and then he was moving faster, feet banging the metal floor, hands searching and scrabbling for the doors, and then he was stumbling out onto the cold, welcome snow and on all fours, gagging, acid bile bursting from his mouth and spilling over his chin.

  24

  _________________________

  THE CHEVY FLEETLINE sat in the darkness before the wrecking yard beneath a soft dusting of new snow. Cal let down the car window, and cigarette smoke twined out into the night air. He sipped from a cup of old coffee, grimaced, and poured more whiskey into it, shaking the last drops from the bottle. He knew he needed to slow down, but since seeing the women’s bodies he’d been unable to see much else, and only the drink blurred the edges of the nightmare. His hands trembled when he raised the cup to his lips, and he cursed them, wishing the whiskey had more of an effect.

  Since discovering the trailer, he and Dante had said very little but seemed to have instinctively arrived at the same decision. They knew they had to call it in to Owen, and they knew that once that call was made, they were on the outside again. Even Fierro would have to put up a wall against them. They’d give it one night and see if anything came of it.

  The Bruins game reverberated tinnily from the dark interior of the car. Woody Dumart had just split two defenders and, instead of passing to wide-open Peirson coming on the right wing, decided to take it himself as Bill Barilko straightened him up with a high cross-check. A fight ensued between the two, and now two other Bruins were fighting with Fleming Mackell at the top of the crease.

  “That cheap bastard,” Cal said. “Send the fuck off!”

  Dante lit another cigarette. The smell of butane hung heavy in the cold air. Cal watched him staring at the flickering flame, the cigarette smoldering in his hand. Dante clicked the lighter shut, then popped it open again, stared at the small fire-glow. Cal pursed his lips and tried to ignore him.

  “Cut it out, would you?” he said after a moment. He shifted in his seat, sneezed, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and squinted through the glass. “We’ve lost this fucking game,” he said. “Our offense is for shit.”

  He reached over Dante for the extra pint of whiskey he kept in the glove compartment. He unscrewed the top and poured it into his inch of leftover coffee, held it out for Dante, who shook his head.

  The far lights of Moon Island receded as he watched. The windshield was freezing over again. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine hesitated at first and then, grudgingly, rumbled into life. He waited for the engine to warm and then turned on the heater. After a while the glass cleared, and Cal killed the engine again. The game was over. He owed Charlie a fin. The radio spat with static and Cal switched it off.

  He sipped his coffee. The hours passed. Ragged men passed in and out of the trailers they called home. The Boston skyline glittered like distant cold stars. Cal’s eyes tracked a black shimmer of water from one of the pumping station sluices as, undulating, it flowed into the bay. He turned the radio back on and tuned the station to a soft piano jazz ballad. When the song ended, the deejay’s voice sounded as if coming from a great distance, deep timbred and warm, barely above a spoken whisper.

  Dante yawned, stretched his arm forward, pulled back his coat sleeve, and by the dim light of the radio checked his watch, squinting.

  “It’s two o’clock,” he said. “Nothing’s happening tonight.”

  Cal shrugged.

  “I’d rather be at the Rialto watching Rocky Lane.”

  Cal blew smoke at the ceiling, rubbed his upper lip with a knuckle. “What was that last one he did?”

  “Vigilante Hideout.”

  “I liked Frisco Tornado myself.”

  “Gunmen of Abilene was his best so far.”

  “Didn’t think much of that one.”

  Cal studied the trailers and then the pasture. He turned in his seat and watched the far and few lights of cars speeding along the highway toward the city. Across the channel the lights of barges bobbed and dipped. He rolled his shoulders, put the window back down to let some cold air in.

  Cal stared at the old neighborhood below the South Street Bridge leading to the city. The hulking black shapes of warehouses and factories, J&B Storage and Old Colony Meats, a nineteenth-century abattoir still in use. During the summer months the mewling and lowing of cattle about to be slaughtered used to reverberate down the channel to his parents’ tenement on Cardinal Ryan Way. That was before they’d moved to Fields Corner. When he asked his mother what the sound was, she told him it was an Irish wake farther down the avenue. During that summer when he was ten, he heard it most every night, as if people were always dying, for the Irish were always having wakes.

  Dante raised the binoculars again, panned the Mile Road. “Why’d you think someone’s going to show? Even that bum said the guy hadn’t been back in days.”

  “For shits and giggles, I don’t know. It’s how this guy gets his kicks. He can’t stay away.”

  “Yeah, but why tonight?”

  “It might be tonight, it might be tomorrow night. It might be next week. But he’s kept the bodies in the trailer—”

  “All except Sheila’s.” They hadn’t mentioned her name since they’d seen the trailer, and Cal paused with his cup before his lip.

  “—all except Sheila’s, right, but he’s kept the bodies in the trailer for a reason. Until he kills another girl, I think he’ll keep using them.”

  Dante grimaced, shook his head. Frustrated, he mashed his cigarette into the overflowing ashtray.

  “Do me a favor and dump that out, would you? My car’s starting to smell like a crematorium.”

  “Hold up. What’s he doing?”

  Cal followed Dante’s eyes and looked toward the rows of trailers. A bum had pulled down his pants and, hands between his legs cupping his balls against the cold, squatted on his haunches on the far side of the trailers by the wheel wells. The wind whipped his oversized coat about him.

  “He’s taking a shit.”

  Dante stared at the man through the binoculars, his brow creasing in concentration.

  “Jesus. Let the man take a shit in peace, would you.”

  After a moment Dante grunted, laid his head back against the headrest, and closed his eyes. Wind moaned through the rusted towers of crushed cars, whistling high then low. The chain-link fence rattled. Cal finished the pint of whiskey, rolled the window back up, and turned the engine over again, allowing heat to fill the car. His head felt thick and heavy. The dashboard radio glowed warmly in the dark. Cal’s head jerked on his neck and he swore, inhaled deeply, and forced his eyes open. It took him a moment to see the car with its lights off making its way slowly across the rutted gravel from the Mile Road and between the darkened shacks. Cal tongued his gums and killed the engine, rolled down his window again so that cold air filled the car. Dante didn’t move, but his eyes were open and he was staring at the approaching car. Slowly, he raised the binoculars.

  “Our man,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  The car, a long-bodied black Lincoln, circled wide and slow before the shuttered and wrecked trailers. It passed beneath the wrecking yard’s single halogen lamp and was illuminated, light slipping across its metal like a fish moving through water. Smoke curled white from twin tailpipes, and then it moved though darkness again and pulled in before the farthest abandoned trailer.

  Cal and Dante watched the smoke steaming from its exhaust and then t
he smoke stopped, the driver’s-side door opened, and a man climbed out. His footsteps broke the thin surface of ice that had covered the snow and the sound of it came to them.

  “Scarletti?” Cal said.

  “I don’t think so, not the way the bum described him. This guy looks much smaller. Give me a second. I’m waiting for him to step into the light.”

  Cal leaned closer and stared into the dark, trying to see what Dante was seeing. The man wore a black watch cap pulled low over his head and a long black leather jacket that seemed to shine wetly in the light, its collar raised to protect his neck. He stepped through the snow, the meager glow of a flashlight bobbing before him, and moved without hurry toward the trailer containing the dead women. He knew where he was going all right. Cal realized he had been holding his breath, and exhaled long and slow. The figure reached up to the padlocked chain, and paused. He realized the seal had been broken, and turned, alarmed—the beam of his flashlight arcing crazily through the dark—and Cal flicked on the car’s headlights. For a brief moment they could see his face fully and saw that it was Blackie Foley.

  Dante lowered the binoculars and surprise hissed through Cal’s teeth. Something held the both of them in their seats even as the figure darted from the trailer, and then Dante shouted, “Gun it!” but Cal was already stomping on the accelerator and releasing the clutch, the rear tires of the Fleetline spinning for traction, snow and frozen gravel banging in the wheel wells and digging craters in the snow beneath them. The Fleetline fishtailed to the left and right as they sped toward the trailer. Cal’s heart hammered in his chest and nausea swirled in the pit of his stomach. It was the type of fear he’d felt in the war.

  At the last moment he locked the car’s high beams on the trailer, cut the wheel to trap the Lincoln, momentarily catching a black figure racing toward the car, and then a gunshot sounded and the windshield fractured before them. Glass sprayed their faces, and Cal ducked to shield his eyes, even as he pressed the car forward.

  “The fuck!” he shouted, and jammed the gearshift upward, gearbox grinding. The engine screeched. With head lowered to the console, he tried to see through the spiderweb of cracked glass, and then sensing even as he realized it was too late that the tires were floating, riding above the ice, and that they’d lost traction and were gliding forward out of control. “Goddammit!” he hollered as the Fleetline began to turn in a wide pirouette, so at first they were moving alongside the Lincoln—they could see the blurred dark shape of the driver at the wheel through frost-covered glass, and then the Lincoln was roaring backward, barreling across the frozen gravel toward the gates of the yard, its exhaust mushrooming blue—and then they were turned away from it, the rear of the Fleetline like a missile careening toward the sloping drop into the sewage canal.