Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales

by Loren D. Estleman

  I know his routine thanks to Nola, but I follow him for a week, just to look. I’ve taken personal time, of which I’ve built up about a year, undercover being twenty-four/seven. The guy logs four hours total in the office; rest of the time he’s lunching with clients, golfing with the senior partner, putting on deck shoes and dorky white shorts and pushing a speedboat up and down the river, that sort of bullshit. Drowning would be nice, except I’d join him, because I can’t swim and am no good with boats.

  These are my days. Nights I’m with Nola, working our way through the Kama Sutra and adding footnotes of our own.

  The only time I can expect Hollis to be alone without a boat involved is when he takes his Jaguar for a spin. It’s his toy, he doesn’t share it. Trouble is not even Nola knows when he’ll get the urge. So every day when he’s home I park around the corner and trot back to his north fence, watching for that green convertible. It’s a blind spot to the neighbors too, and for the benefit of passersby I’m wearing a jogging suit; just another fatcat following the surgeon general’s advice.

  Four days in, nothing comes through that gate but Hollis’s black Mercedes, either with his wife on the passenger’s side or just him taking a crowded route to work or the country club. I’m figuring I can get away with the jogging gig maybe another half a day before someone gets nervous and calls the cops, when out comes the Jag, spitting chunks of limestone off the inside curves of the driveway. I hustle back to my car. Hollis must need unwinding, because he’s ten miles over the limit and almost out of sight when I turn into his street.

  North is the choice today. In a little while we’re up past the lake, with the subdivisions thinning out along a two-lane blacktop. It’s a workday—Nola’s in the office, good alibi—and for miles we’re the only two cars, so I’m hanging back, but I can tell he’s not paying attention to his rearview or he’d open it up and leave me in the dust. Arrogant son of a bitch thinks he’s invulnerable. You see how I’m taking every opportunity to work up a good hate? I’m still not committed. I’m thinking when I get him alone I’ll work him over, whisper in his ear what’s in store if he doesn’t lay off Nola. He’s such a soft-looking slob I know he’ll cave if I just knock out a tooth.

  After an hour and a half we’ve left the blacktop and are towing twin streamers of dust down a dirt road with farms on both sides and here and there a copse of trees left for windbreaks. Now it’s time to open the ball. I’ve got police lights installed inside the grille, and as I press down the accelerator I flip them on. Now he finds his rearview mirror, begins to slow down. But we’re short of the next copse of trees, so I close in and encourage him forward, then as we enter the shade I signal him to pull over.

  I’ve shucked the jogging suit by this time, and am wearing my old uniform. I put on my cap and get out and approach the Jag with my hand resting on the sidearm on my right hip. The window on the driver’s side purrs down, he flashes his pearlies nervously. “Was I speeding, Officer?”

  “Step out of the car, please.”

  He’s got his wallet out. “I have my license and registration.” I tell him again to step out of the car.

  He looks surprised, but he puts the wallet away and grasps the door handle. His jaw’s set I can see he thinks it’s a case of mistaken identity and he may have a lucrative harassment suit if he can make himself disagreeable enough. Then his face changes again. He’s looking at the uniform.

  “You’re pretty far out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? This area is patrolled by the county sheriff.”

  I repeat myself a second time, and this time I draw my sidearm.

  “Fuck you, fake cop,” says he, and floors it.

  But it’s a gravel road, and the tires spin for a second, spraying gravel, bits of which strike my legs and sting like hornets, which gives me the mad to make that lunge and grab the window post with my free hand. Just then the tread bites and the Jag spurts ahead and I know I’m going to be dragged if I don’t let go or stop him.

  I don’t let go. I stick the barrel of my revolver through the window, cocking the hammer for the effect, and who knows but it might have worked, except my fingers slip off the window post and as I fall away from the car I strike my other wrist against the post and a round punches a hole through the windshield. Hollis screams, thinks he’s hit, takes his hands off the wheel, and that’s the last I see of him until after the Jag plunges into a tree by the side of the road. The bang’s so loud if you even heard my revolver go off you’d forget about it because the second report is still ringing in your ears thirty seconds later, across a whole fucking field of wheat.

  I get up off the ground and sprint up to the car, still holding the gun. The hood’s folded like a road map, the radiator pouring steam. Hollis’s forehead is leaning against the cracked steering wheel. I look up and down the road and across the field opposite the stand of trees. Not a soul in sight, if you don’t count a cow looking our way. Just as I’m starting to assimilate the size of my good break, I hear moaning. Hollis is lifting his head. Lawyers are notoriously hard to kill.

  His forehead’s split, his face is covered with blood. It looks bad enough to finish him even if it wasn’t instantaneous, but I’m no doctor. I guess you could say I panicked. I reached through the window and hit him with the butt of the revolver, how many times I don’t know, six or seven or maybe as many as a dozen. The bone of his forehead started to make squishing sounds like thin ice that’s cracking under your feet, squirting water up through the fissures. Only in this case it wasn’t water, of course, and I know I’m going to have to burn the uniform because my gun arm is soaked to the elbow with blood and gray ooze: Finally I stop swinging the gun and feel for a pulse in his carotid. He wasn’t using it any more. I holstered the revolver, took his head in both hands, and rested his squishy forehead against the steering wheel where it had struck. The windshield’s still intact except for the bullet hole, so I look around and find a fallen tree limb and give it the old Kaline swing, smashing in the rest of the glass from outside. I settle the limb back into the spot where it had lain among the rotted leaves on the ground, take a last look to make sure I didn’t drop anything, get into my car, and. leave, making sure first to put the jogging suit back on over my gory uniform. And only the cow is there to see me make my getaway,

  For the next few days I stay clear of Nola. I don’t even call, knowing she’ll hear about it on the news; I can’t afford anyone seeing us together. I guess I was being overcautious. Hollis’s death was investigated as an accident, and at the end of a week the sheriff tells the press the driver lost control on loose gravel I guess the cow didn’t want to get involved

  I was feeling good about myself. I didn’t see any need to wrestle with my conscience over the death of a sexual predator, and a high-price lawyer to boot. As is the way of human nature I patted my own back for a set of fortunate circumstances over which I’d had no control. I was starting to feel God was on my side.

  But Nola isn’t. When I finally do visit, after the cops have paid their routine calla dn gone away satisfied her beef with her employer was unconnected with an accident upstate, she gives me hell for staying away, accuses me of cowardly leaving her to face the police alone. I settle her down finally, but I can see my explanation doesn’t satisfy. As I’m taking off my coat to get comfortable she tells me she has an early morning, everyone at the firm is working harder in Hollis’s absence and she needs her sleep. This is crap because Hollis was absent almost as often when he was alive, but I leave.

  She doesn’t answer her phone for two days after that. When I go to the apartment her bell doesn’t answer and her car isn’t in the port. I come back another night, same thing. I lean against the building groping in my pockets, forgetting I don’t smoke anymore, then Nola’s old yellow Camaro swings in off Jefferson and I step back into the shadow, because there are two people in that front seat. I watch as the lights go off and they get out.

  “If you’re afraid of him, why don’t you call the police?” A yo
ung male voice, belonging to a slender figure in a green tank top and torn jeans.

  “Because he is the police. Oh, Chris, I’m terrified. He won’t stop hounding me this side of the grave.” And saying this Nola huddles next to him and hands him her keys to open the front door, which he does one-handed, his other being curled around her waist.

  They go inside, and the latch clicking behind them sounds like the coffin lid shutting in my face. Nola’s got a new shark in her school. I’m the chum she’s feeding him. And I know without having to think about it that I’ve killed this schnook Ethan Hollis for the same reason Chris is going to kill me; I’ve run out of uses. So for Chris, I’m now the sexual predator.

  That’s why we’re talking now. It’s Nola or me, and I need to be somewhere else when she has her accident. I’ve got a feeling I’m not in the clear over Hollis. Call it cop’s sense, but I’ve been part of the community so long I know when I’ve been excluded. Even Carpenter won’t look me in the eye when we’re talking about the flicking Pistons. I’ve been tagged.

  Except you’re not going to kill Nola, sweetie. No, not because you’re a woman; you girls have moved into every other job, why not this? You’re not going to do it because you’re a cop.

  Forget how I know. Say a shitter knows a shitter and leave it there. What? Sure, I noticed when you reached up under your blouse. I thought at the time you were adjusting your bra, but–well, that was before I said I’d decided to kill Hollis, wasn’t it? I hope your crew buys it, two wires coming loose in the same cop’s presence within a couple of weeks. I’ll leave first so you can go out to the van and tell them the bad news. I live over on Howard. Well, you know the address. You bring the wine–no Jack and Coke–I’ll cook the steaks. I think I can finish convincing you about Nola. Like killing a snake.

  FLASH

  Midge was glad he’d put on the electric-blue suit that day. He could use the luck.

  Mr. Wassermann didn’t approve of the suit. At the beginning of their professional relationship, he’d introduced Midge to his tailor, a small man in gold-rimmed glasses who looked and dressed like Mr. Wassermann, and who gently steered the big man away from the bolts of shimmering sharkskin the concern kept in stock for its gambler clients, and taught him to appreciate the subtleties of gray worsted and fawn-colored flannel. He cut Midge’s jackets to allow for the underarm Glock rather than obliging him to buy them a size too large, and made his face blush when he explained the difference between “dressing left” and “dressing right.”

  The tailoring bills came out of Midge’s salary, a fact for which he was more grateful than if the suits had been a gift. He was no one’s charity case. The distinction was important, because he knew former fighters who stood in welfare lines and on street corners, holding signs saying they would work for food. Back when they were at the top of the bill, they had made the rounds of all the clubs with yards of gold chain around their necks, girls on both arms, and now here they were, saying they would clean out your gutters for a tuna sandwich, expecting pedestrians to feel guilty enough to buy them the sandwich and skip the gutters. Mr. Wassermann never gave anyone anything for nothing—it was a saying on the street, Midge had heard him confirm it in person—and the big ex-fighter was proud to be able to say in return that he never took anything from anyone for nothing.

  He liked the way he looked in the suits. They complemented his height without calling attention to his bulk, did not make him look poured into his clothes the way so many of his overdeveloped colleagues appeared when they dressed for the street, and if it weren’t for his Jagged nose and the balloons of scar tissue.. around his eyes, he thought he might have passed for a retired NFL running back with plenty in Wall Street. Of course, that’s when he wasn’t walking with Mr. Wassermann, when no one would mistake him for anything but personal security.

  Today, however, without giving the thing much thought, he’d decided to wear the electric-blue double-breasted he’d worn to Mr. Wassermann’s office the day they’d met. He’d had on the same shade of trunks when he KO’d Lincoln Flagg at Temple Gate Arena and again when he took the decision from Sailor Burelli at Waterworks Park. He’d liked plenty of flash in those days, in and out of the ring: gold crowns, red velvet robes with Italian silk linings, crocodile luggage, yellow convertibles. Make ‘em notice you, he’d thought, and you just naturally have to do your best.

  But then his run had finished. He lost two key fights, his business manager decamped to Ecuador with his portfolio, the IRS attached his beach house. The last of the convertibles went back to the finance company. In a final burst of humiliation, an Internet millionaire with dimples on his forehead bought Midge’s robes at auction for his weekend guests to wear around the swimming pool When Midge had asked Mr. Wassermann for the bodyguard job, he’d been living for some time in a furnished room on Magellan Street and the electric-blue was the only suit he owned.

  It had brought him luck, just as the trunks had. He’d gotten the job, and right away his fortunes turned around. Because Mr. Wassermann preferred to keep his protection close, even when it was off duty, he had moved Midge into a comfortable three-room suite in the East Wing, paid for his security training and opened an expense account for him at Rinehart’s, where well-dressed salesmen advised him on which accessories to wear with his new suits and supplied him with turtle-backed hairbrushes and aftershave. On the rare occasions when his reclusive employer visited a restaurant (too many of his colleagues had been photographed in such places with their faces in their plates and bullet holes In their heads), he always asked the chef to prepare a takeout meal for Midge to eat when they returned home. These little courtesies were offered as if they were part of the terms of employment.

  Because there were other bodyguards, Midge had Saturdays off, and with money in the pocket of a finely tailored suit, he rarely spent them alone. The women who were drawn to the aura of sinister power that surrounded Mr. Wassermann belonged to a class Midge could not have approached when he was a mere pug. While waiting for his employer, he would see a picture of a stunning model in Celebrity and remember how she looked naked in his bed at the Embassy.

  There had been a long dry spell In that department after his last fight. True, his face had been stitched and swollen and hard to look at, but that wasn’t an impediment after the Burelli decision, when eighteen inches of four-oh thread and a patch of gauze were the only things holding his right ear to his head; he’d made the cover of Turnbuckle that week and signed a contract to endorse a national brand of athlete’s-foot powder. He’d considered hiring his own bodyguard to fight off the bottle-blond waitresses. But that was when he was winning. The two big losses and particularly the stench that had clung to the twelve rounds he’d dropped to Sonny Rodriguez at the Palace Garden might as well have been a well-advertised case of the clap.

  The fans had catcalled and crumpled their programs and beer cups and hurled them at the contestants. The Palace management had been forced to call the police to escort them to their dressing rooms. Three weeks later, the state boxing commission had reviewed the videotape and yanked Midge’s license.

  The irony was, he hadn’t gone Into the tank, he’d taken the money when it was offered, and since he considered himself an ethical person he’d fully intended to fake a couple of falls and force a decision against him, but he hadn’t gone three rounds before he realized he was no match for the untried youngster from Nicaragua. He was out of shape and slow, and Rodriguez was graceless for all the fact that any one of his blows would have downed a young tree. Even the fellow who had approached Midge and ought to have known a fix from a legitimate loss called him afterward to tell him he was a rotten actor; he feared a congressional investigation.

  Midge had considered returning the money, but that had proven to be a more complicated thing altogether than he’d suspected. He was both a fighter who had sold out and who had never thrown a fight. Just trying to think where that placed him in the scheme of things gave him a headache worse than the one h
e’d suffered for two weeks after he went down to Ricky Shapiro.

  On this particular Saturday off, he’d broken a date with a soap opera vixen to meet a man with whom Mr. Wasserman sometimes did business. Angelo DeRiga—“Little Angie,” Midge had heard him called, although he was not especially small, in fact an inch or two taller than Mr. Wassermann—dyed his hair black, even his eyebrows, and wore suits that were as well made as Midge’s new ones, from material of the same good quality, but were cut too young for him. The flaring lapels and cinched waists called attention to the fact that he was nearing sixty, just as the black black hair brought out the deep lines in the artificial tan of his face. The effect was pinched and painful and increased the bodyguards appreciation for his employer’s dignified herringbones and barbered white fringe.

  Little Angie shook Midge’s hand at the door to his the King William, complimented him upon his suit—“Flash, the genuine article,” he said, and invited him to sample the gourmet spread the hotel’s waiters were busy transferring from a wheeled cart to the glass-topped mahogany table in the sitting room.

  Midge, who knew as well as Little Angie that the electric-blue sack was inappropriate, did not thank him, and politely refused the offer of food. He wasn’t hungry, and anyway, chewing interfered with his concentration. Too many blows to the head had damaged his hearing. High-and low-pitched voices were the worst, and certain labials missed him entirely. By focusing his attention on the speaker, and with the help of some amateur lipreading, he’d managed to disguise this rather serious disability for a watchdog to have from even so observant a man as Mr. Wassermann; but then Mr. Wassermann spoke slowly, and always around the middle range. Little Angie was shrill and carried on every conversation as if it were on a fast elevator and had to finish before the car reached his floor.