A Good and Useful Hurt

by Aric Davis

  When it was done, Mike felt the true ache in his beleaguered hands and wrists, the muscles and tendons pushed to the brink. The beginnings of dawn surged at the windows, and for the first time in a long time Mike wished he had a cigarette.

  On the table before him lay the face of a killer.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  When true morning came around eight o’clock, Mike called Doc. Doc had just been about to call him as well; apparently, the revelation of drawing the man had a twin in the dream world Doc lived in with them.

  While Mike waited for his friend to arrive, he made coffee. Less than fifteen minutes later Doc walked in. Mike had cleaned up the table, removed all the pencils and other drawing supplies so that the sketch lay solitary on the table.

  Doc walked to it and said, “Incredible. How?”

  “I listened. Only this time, they had something to tell me. They’d all seen more than they’d thought.”

  “Do you think that’s really him?”

  “I do. I really do. He’s tall, about six foot five, and he has green eyes. They all believe that his hatred for women will follow into his personal life, but I can’t see how we’re to judge that. He was wearing a shirt with a nametag that said ‘Phil’ for at least two of them. Whether that means anything or not, I’ve no clue. One of the girls said that our guy smelled like a machine shop; her dad used to work in one. I think he’s over in that factory district where two of the murders took place, and I think if we wait and look long enough, we’re going to find some six-and-a-half-foot-tall machinist with a bad attitude named Phil.”

  Doc eyed the picture and then said to Mike, “Did Hladini talk to you?”

  “A little, why?”

  “I engaged in some analysis with a couple of them, Hladini included. Yes, I know, I merely teach the subject, but I know my way around a psyche well enough to be sure she’s been holding out.”

  “Can you get through to her? What do you think she knows?”

  “I might be able to, I might not. For now, we’ll just have to hope the picture is enough. We can begin to narrow down potential factories today; there are a few factors that should make it easier. I’m quite certain he doesn’t work third shift, for starters; even second would be difficult.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “The killings have always been at night, and all different nights of the week. If he is working at a factory, his schedule is going to be regimented; I doubt he’d be able to take multiple days off without at least some notice. Our boy has been cool about everything else so far; it’s difficult for me to believe that he’d reveal himself in such a way. All it would take to draw attention to this activity would be for our friend to call in sick every time there was a murder, and for his shift manager to have even a mild interest in current events. We’ve already missed the arrival of the first shift today, but from here on we should be able to watch a minimum of two shift changes daily.”

  Mike shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “If we’re wrong about the area, we won’t have time to check out any other industrial areas. And even if we’re right, there’s probably more than a dozen factories over there. What else did they say to you?”

  “Not much of use, even though every single one of them was able to recall seeing him at least once before they were killed. To tell you the truth, I’d planned to come over and play police sketch artist with you, but it looks like that job’s been taken. This is an extraordinary image, Mike. I think all there is to do is to start staking out factories and hope for a breakthrough. There is one thing we need to discuss though, something I’ve been loath to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “When we catch this fellow, what do you imagine happens?”

  Mike thought about that for a few seconds and said, “Well honestly, Doc, I hadn’t really figured on a whole lot besides shooting him. I don’t think the police would believe a word of this, and even if they do, I can’t see much of it standing up in court. I don’t think our guy is likely to leave any evidence around that would implicate himself, if he hasn’t yet. You had something else in mind?”

  “If you shoot him and we’re wrong about him, then you’ll go to prison. Chances are, either way you’ll end up in prison. Could you deal with that? Not just prison, but with taking the wrong life and damning any chance to catch the man who is responsible? I know you better than that, no matter what you might say.

  “I have another idea, one that I think could potentially both put him behind bars and, if he’s guilty, kill him. You could make ink with all of their ashes in it and tattoo him with it. You saw how they reacted when they were hurt. Imagine if they were stuck inside of him.”

  “How would I get close enough to him to do that? He’s a pretty big guy, and I don’t think he’d take me up on the offer of a gift certificate. Even if I could do it, there’s no guarantee it would work.”

  “That’s why we’re going to put a moratorium on that train of thought when we hit about twenty-four hours from the night when he’s supposed to kill again. That gives us five days to work that angle. After that, if you like, you can carry your gun. Until then, though, I just don’t see that as a safe enough option, Mike. I know my idea is tenuous, and has the possibility of having a less than successful outcome, but there is less to lose. We have to spare some thought for ourselves, don’t we?”

  Mike sighed and ran his hand across the pencil sketching—the face of a killer, if he’d done it right. He thought about Lamar and Becky. What would be left for them if he killed the wrong man? The shop would close; there was no doubt about that. Lamar and Becky must not only be confused about what he’d been up to, but furious about the jeopardy his absence was placing the shop in. He hadn’t looked at his phone other than to call Doc since the last time he’d spoken with Becky, and he hadn’t been in touch with Lamar at all. He felt a flash of guilt at the thought that he’d yet to meet Rani. How many calls had he missed? Who was working in his stead?

  “Alright, Doc, I’ll mix up a little bottle of ink and figure out something for the needles. But I’m still bringing the gun. When I poke this fucker, I need a backup plan, and a .357 seems like the best one possible.”

  “Alright, that’ll be fine. I suggest we do some research, and then see if we can catch more than one shift change today. If it works out that different businesses let them leave at different times, we’ll be able to eliminate places faster. As much as I’d like to think Hladini holds some secret bit of information I can cull from her, it seems far more likely that she is too broken, too gone to give us anything helpful. In any case, it’s nothing we can count on.” He stood and brushed off the front of his pants. “Let’s get to it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  They settled on three factories, all in close proximity to one another, to watch that afternoon. As luck would have it, Doc’s work on the phone revealed that these three did indeed have staggered shift release times due to a traffic reduction agreement with the city.

  Doc brought along a pair of binoculars. They sat camped out at the back of the parking lot of the factory with the earliest release time, about a hundred feet away from the next closest car. The lot was enormous, and Mike was thinking that there was no way they could properly eliminate everyone when the whistle blew. He raised the binoculars and sighted on the door Doc had pointed out for him.

  “Remember, we’re looking for height first. If you see anyone who looks like our man, speak up and we’ll both give him a look before we approach him.”

  Mike had shrunk the picture of the face, and both men had a copy sitting on their laps. Mike ranged in his binoculars and watched the door through them. At last it opened, and then a flood of men were streaming from it.

  They all looked big to Mike, strong-looking, filthy denizens of a dank and dirty place that manufactured automobile parts. They wore similar clothing, but though they were all dressed in a similar fashion, they were not wearing any sort of uniform. If coveralls were used, they were left inside.
A couple of men were in gray, but there were certainly no supplied work outfits. The flood slowed to a trickle as the men walked to their vehicles.

  As the flood of workers came closer, Mike could see them more clearly. A great number of them revealed themselves to be women—women as filthy as the men they worked with. The sexes were difficult to differentiate, even at a distance. Gender didn’t much matter, Mike realized: Phil was so tall he would be easy to pick from a crowd.

  When the sea of bodies had pushed its final ebb from the cavern and the new shift was starting its day’s work, they left, with no information save that, if he did work there, he hadn’t today. Not dejected, at least not yet, Doc put down his binoculars and drove them to the next building.

  In the second lot the building and parking areas were just as voluminous as the last, but there were less than a quarter of the cars. Doc parked in the back of the lot anyway, and a few minutes later, they watched the doors open and the flood begin.

  The workers here were different. Still no coveralls; these all wore white T-shirts and pants. There were fewer than at the last factory, but the only person close to matching the description was an extraordinarily tall woman with long blonde hair. The lot had yet to clear before they moved on, and the third proved to be no better.

  Still not dejected, but sobered by the enormity of the task, the two drove back to the apartment. Doc dropped off Mike, and he went inside.

  Mike’s sleep that night was fitful. Twice he found himself in the interrogation room, but he woke before he’d been able to talk to any of them. At four thirty, he quit bed, got dressed, and went to make a pot of coffee.

  His cell phone was blinking that he’d missed three calls, and he shut it off. The coffee was bitter. Mike liked his with cream and he was out, was out of almost every comestible as far as that went. He was pretty sure he hadn’t eaten a decent meal since Deb had died.

  That thought brought on a personal inspection.

  His shirt and pants were ridiculous, huge things that seemed as though they’d been built for a different person. His belt was on the furthest hole from the buckle, though he couldn’t remember tightening it. He walked into the bathroom and looked into the mirror for the first time in weeks.

  His skin was the first thing he noticed: he was pale and almost yellow in the indoor light. His gums appeared to have retracted from his teeth, and his eyes looked dull. Did the sleep he was getting even count as sleep? How long could he go like this? How long could Doc go?

  Mike wondered if perhaps his body hadn’t allowed him to really sleep because sleep had become more mentally strenuous than being awake was. What was going to be the price for all of this, and could either he or Doc ever go back?

  He waited two hours at the table drinking coffee and staring at Sid’s lifeless body on the bathroom floor before Doc arrived and they left.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  The second day of what Doc had begun calling “bird-watching” started much like the first. There was no one of interest at the first or second shift changes they watched, and as they drove to the third, Doc spoke.

  “This is faulty reasoning. There are so many more factories than I’d ever have figured on, and that says nothing of the people. Where do all of these people come from? We can’t expect this to work, at least not in the way we were thinking it would.”

  “Any luck with Hladini?”

  “None. She’s more withdrawn, if anything. I know with time she would be a problem I could solve, but time is an enemy becoming more threatening by the hour. She knows something, but I’ve lost all hope of pulling it from her in time. Our best bet is to continue on the path we’ve chosen and hope things work in our favor.”

  “Do you think that’s good enough? I mean, there’ll be a dead girl in just a few days, and we knew it was going to happen.”

  “So what do you propose we do? No one would believe it, not even the young lady herself, not to mention we have no clue who she is. All we can do is hope that we get lucky and find him before he takes action. And who’s to say he won’t strike earlier? We need to see this done, and it needs to be done as soon as possible.”

  Doc pulled the car into the lot of the next factory, and they set to work with the binoculars, eliminating possibility after possibility. Doc saw one man who was close to tall enough, but the face was nothing like that on the paper. They watched for as long as they could, and when it was done they left.

  The night was no better, and though neither said it, both were thinking the same thing: four days.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  “She knows him.”

  They were in the back of a parking lot off of Thirty-sixth Street. First shift was set to end in less than ten minutes.

  “How do you know?” Mike asked.

  “I just do. It’s in the way she talks. The other women have been making space around her, almost as if they can smell it on her—and I have a feeling that they can smell it, or hear it, or sense it in some other way. Is she segregated from them when you see her?”

  Mike thought about that. Hladini had been set aside from them for him from the start because of her lack of knowledge of what had happened to her. He talked to the other women constantly—Deb most of all, and Annie almost as much, but the others were not ignored. Hladini, though, that was an interesting thing. He couldn’t recall anyone speaking to her at length after her introduction. Was it because she couldn’t or wouldn’t remember, or was it something else? None of the rest of them wanted to remember or talk about what happened, but they all did so willingly, and Mike didn’t think it was all for vengeance. They wanted to keep him from killing again.

  Mike tapped the purse to feel the needle and the small bottle of ink next to it. Those first few days had been scouting only, and he hadn’t carried the tools necessary to fulfill either Doc’s plan or his own. “What delusion,” Doc had said. “That we would think ourselves able to not only find this man easily but to study him to be sure.” Doc was right, delusion and stupidity. They both knew better now. Even one opportunity would be hard to come by. This man they hunted knew he was hunted, knew an entire city was praying that he would be discovered.

  Mike kept the needles and ink in a small clutch that Deb had purchased for fifty cents at a secondhand store. The clutch had the words “Mrs. Timberlake” embroidered across its front, and when Deb had bought it she’d leaned in close to the cashier and said, “Justin wants everyone to know who I am.” The woman had just nodded, and Deb was in near hysterics when they left the store. She’d used the bag once or twice, but now Mike carried it every day like some lucky talisman. In his pants pocket was the revolver.

  The factory emptied as Mike peered through Doc’s binoculars, and he said, “How would she know him?”

  “It could have been anything—look at this fellow to my left.”

  “No, the face isn’t right, and I think he’s got blue eyes. You’re right on with the height, though.”

  “Ahh, you’re right. I think she knew him from work. I’ve never talked to her about where she worked. If she temped at one of these factories, she could have known him or at least have seen him. I’ve been so focused on trying to get her to recall the attack, as if it were done by a neighbor or acquaintance, perhaps even an ex, that I totally glossed the idea that she might have just known him. I think they’re almost all out.”

  “He could be a repairman who floats from place to place. If he were, he’d keep more odd hours. You need to crack her, Doc. You have to.”

  Mike rubbed his hand over the clutch in his pocket and lowered the binoculars. He noticed his hands were trembling. If not today, then when? There was almost no time left, and if they failed, what was going to happen when he slept? Would Deb even come back?

  “Let’s go back to your apartment,” Doc said all at once. “We’re skipping tonight’s bird-watching. I’m going to take a pill and I’m going to crack her.”

  Mike didn’t say anything, just watched the road as Doc drove.
/>   CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Doc awoke on the couch across from Mike as though he were shooting free from something, like a cork expelled from a bottle.

  “He delivers rugs. The man we’re looking for delivers small area rugs from a linen supply company. He works in the area we’ve been looking at. Hladini said she used to flirt with him when he’d come into the oil change she worked at, and that he usually dropped by to change their rugs once a week. She hasn’t come forward because she was ashamed of her desire for him. Even in death, we’re ruled by shame! It’s incredible!”

  “What day did he make his deliveries? What time of day?”

  “I tried, but she couldn’t specify. We’ll just have to find him. I’m sure all of them use that type of service to some degree or another. We just need to catch him at his rounds. I feel good about this, I really do!”

  Mike wasn’t sure what to say to that. Doc might feel good, but he looked like shit. Mike hadn’t looked at himself in the mirror in a couple of days, but he knew he had to look worse than he had the last time, and that wasn’t good. He felt like a shrunken, reheated version of himself. While Doc had slept, Becky had called twice, and Mike had neither the patience nor the energy to answer or call her back. Instead, he asked Doc what he wanted to do next.

  “All we need to do is find a linen truck with an enormous driver in the cab. If we can’t find him, we’ll have to figure out something else. We could stake out the delivery companies—there can’t be but a few. We need to stay positive; this is something to go on, even if it is a bit tenuous.”

  Mike had all but given up. There were only two days left to their deadline, and he’d quit on sleep almost entirely. He couldn’t face them. He and Doc were failing, and in just two nights the girl was going to die. There wasn’t a thing he and Doc hadn’t tried to do with what little experience and knowledge they had of the situation.