Blood Samples
Page 18
Kilgallon closes his eyes, bracing himself against the wave of emotion pouring over him.
And when he opens his eyes, the stocky little woman has vanished.
Kilgallon walks over to the front door, gazes through the dirty screen.
Outside the cabin, the night is turning brilliant, almost Day-Glo bright, the trees like black licorice lace against a deep purple sky, the high tension wires like dark angel hair threading through the clouds. And a squat little woman waddling off into the vibrant darkness with her bucket of cleaning products, an exotic bird.
An endangered species.
Vanishing over the horizon.
Into a land where messy rooms are always straightened, and problems are swept under the rug like so much dust, and mothers love their sons madly, unconditionally.
A land of make believe.
SOMEBODY DOWN HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU
It's getting late, and the shadows are stretching across the bayou, making the little derelict marina look like a graveyard of torn sails and leaning masts swaying in the fishy breeze. The light's different down there below Lake Pontchartrain. That's something I noticed that first night. We got down there about supper time, the kid and I, and the cicadas or the crickets or the frogs — or whatever they got down there in that hot box in the dead of summer — they're like the roar of jet engines in my skull. And the heat's pressing down on us, and our shirts are sticking to our backs from driving all day in that beat-up Jimmy, and I notice everything looks fuzzy and green. Like the sun's drooped behind a pane of insulator glass on the horizon.
"So we don't need a license or anything to go out in this crate?" I ask the old cracker who runs the boat rental place.
His rotten smile widens, his green teeth gleaming in the dusky Louisiana light. "Naw... not unless y'all run into the coast guard."
Then he laughs his phlegmy laugh like a raccoon snorting coke, gesturing down at the cockpit of that rusty bucket of bolts tide to the dock. It's an old Sea Ray diesel pocked with salt sores and a ragged canvas bonnet stretched like a sagging skin across its cabin — a veteran of drug runs and countless illegals rafting out of Mariel, Cuba. I don't know squat about boats. Or the sea. I'm from Chicago, for Christ's sake. Water's for chasing Bushmills and flushing turds. But the thing looks simple enough. A few gauges, a steering wheel, and a couple pairs of stick-shift levers.
"Two bills gets y'all twenty-four hours," he says, "no questions asked."
I look over at Billy. A skinny bundle of bones and zits, draped in an oversized denim shirt with the sleeves fringed off, he's looking down at the GPS receiver with a nervous expression on his ferrety little face. It's gripped in his sweaty palm like a transistor radio, and I can tell when the kid looks up at me that the Freak's moving. We're running out of time. "Uncle Dan, um, we need to, like, make a decision," he says.
I tell him to take it easy. I tell him I got it under control.
He's my cousin Matt's boy — maybe the closest thing to family I ever had. I use him now and again in my skip-trace business, usually as a spotter, or a driver, or whatever. I guess he thinks it's pretty jake having a bounty hunter as an uncle. But this trip is different. We're down here to kill somebody — a first for me — and I still don't like the fact that I brought him along. It's bad enough I expose the boy to the scum-bag bail-bond jumpers I gotta track down.
But now this.
"So uh... fellas... what's the deal?" Mr. Green Teeth pipes up suddenly, and I let out a sigh and offer him a hundred and fifty for the night. He snatches the wad of bills out of my hand with a grumble, then hobbles away toward his tar paper shack at the end of the dock.
We throw the duffel bag in the rear of the cabin, then climb on board the bucket of bolts. The boat pitches like a carnival ride as I thumb the motor on. A gurgling noise, and a fart of exhaust, and then we're surging out of there, the Spanish moss clawing at us like an endless, broken-down car wash as we churn through the soup toward the mouth of the bay. The air smells of rotten eggs.
It takes us maybe fifteen minutes to reach the gulf, and by that time the kid is crawling out of his skin with nervous tension. I tell him to relax. I assure him that the little green dot on that GPS receiver is accurate — I had the kid's mom hide the little pellet of a transmitter inside the Freak's cell phone a week ago — and now all we have to do is close the distance. We won't even have to board the Freak's boat. Just get close enough to get his attention.
Get a clean shot, and we're outta there.
By that point it's already as dark as a stew pot out there, and as we emerge into the open sea, the air changes. I goose the motor a little, and the slimy, sulfurous breeze envelopes us. The sky over the Gulf is frigging huge. I'm not used to seeing all those stars. Where I come from the sky's usually so low and grey you can reach up and scrape your fingertips across it. But this is insane. It's like we just slid out over the edge of the universe.
"The fuck's he doing out there?" Billy hollers over the bellow of the engine, gripping the side of the rocking boat with his free hand, his eyes glittering in the darkness. According to the two little glowing dots on the GPS we're now less than a mile from the Freak's boat, but we still can't see anything out there other than a sheet of black glass stippled with yellow moonlight. I start to wonder if the directions the boy's mother gave me are messed up. Maybe we got the wrong coastline.
"Don't get your piles in an uproar, kid. I told you I got it under —"
The words stick in my throat suddenly.
The first glimpse of the Freak's boat materializes like the tip of a cigarette on the horizon. He's not moving. I yank back on the throttle, and the nose of the Sea Ray sinks, the wake goosing us from behind as we slow down. The kid doesn't say a word when I take the GPS from him and toss it to the deck. "Get the duffel bag."
He goes down below, gets the bag, brings it back up, and I fish around for the Smith & Wesson. It's a chrome .357 I bought off a skel on the street, filed clean, with a red laser sighting device. This is going to be easy, I'm thinking. Right now, I'm thinking this is going to be a piece of cake.
Of course, at that point I had no idea what was about to happen.
Let me take a minute to tell you about the Freak, and why I agreed to resort to murder in order to rid the world of this prick. His real name is Bernard Pryce, and with a name like 'Bernard' it's no wonder he turned out to have issues.
Anyway: Here's how he got his claws into the kid's family. My cousin Ginny — the kid's mom — she had a tough time after the divorce. She couldn't find work, and half of Matt's income as a pipe fitter didn't help much, so she started flirting with what she insisted on calling 'the exotic dancing field.' Brothers and sisters, let me tell you: I like a good table dance as much as the next guy, but working as a dancer in a strip club is about as safe and secure as being a god damned mine sweeper. All manner of scum passes through those places, and when Bernard Pryce showed up one night, he set his sights on Ginny.
At first, I guess, she was swept off her feet: this tall, blonde dude with the fake British accent, and this mysterious business that he's got that takes him to far flung places like Indonesia, the Middle East, and South America. But after a few months of dating the guy, he starts playing rough. Worse than that, Ginny starts stumbling on little clues that he's into some freaky shit. Satanic cult type stuff. A desecrated cross in a drawer, a little vial of blood in the guy's coat pocket — stuff like that. And their sex is getting weird: he wants to tie her up, choke her, drink blood with her, and finally he takes her to this sex club where they're sacrificing a goat or some shit like that.
Ginny decides she's had enough, and she bails. And that's when things really get scary. Bernard comes over one night and beats the shit out of her, and then he ties her up and starts videotaping himself torturing her. He probably would have killed her if the kid hadn't come home. Billy tries to intervene and The Freak does a number on the kid. Beats the tar out of him and then rapes him in front of his mother.
Now by this point, the kid wants to kill him, and Ginny just wants to move away. In fact, she did put her place on the market. But before she could sell the house, she ran across a stash of videos that the Freak had left there. I never saw the tapes. Ginny burned them. But she swears to this day they were the real thing. Honest-to-goodness snuff films. Devil worship stuff. Horrible shit.
That's when she called me. I guess she figured if I didn't kill the guy, her son probably would. And she knew I ran in some petty unsavory circles. Which is kind of funny. Because even though I've dwelled in the asshole of the world for most of my working life, I have this thing about sin. I was raised Catholic for a while — before my drunkard of a daddy skipped town — and I guess the old catechism just clung to me like a bad knee or an allergy you can't shake. Killing is a mortal sin. Thou shalt not do it. Under any circumstances. I've had opportunities. It would be easy for a guy like me. So god damn easy. But then I'd be lost.
Lost.
Maybe that's why I'm sweating bullets that night as we float through the darkness toward that idling speedboat. I'm checking the Smith & Wesson's chamber, snapping it shut with greasy fingers. The Sea Ray's rocking, and my hands are shaking, and I can now see the Freak's boat out there maybe a couple hundred yards away.
It sits there like a black, gleaming coffin, its running light like the smoldering tip of a cigar, twinkling in the sultry salt air. I'm not sure about the distance. Your eyes play tricks on you when it's that dark, and the adrenaline's pumping.
"C'mon, let's do it, c'mon, c'mon," the kid's murmuring behind me.
"Go down below."
"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon." Billy's backing into the shadows of the cabin like a character in some silent horror movie, and the low, strangled, flaky sound of his voice gives me the jeebies. I glance over my shoulder and all I can see is the half moon glow of the kid's pale face hovering in the darkness underneath that parchment bonnet. "C'mon, c'mon, do it... do it, do it, do it, do it!"
By now we're less than a hundred yards away from the Freak's boat, and in the moonlight I can make out the long, pointed prow like the snout of an animal bobbing in the currents. The moonlight gleams off the windshield. Something glows orange within the hold of the boat. The Freak must have dropped anchor because the craft is staying in one place but the optical illusion of white caps pushing across its keel make it look like it's inching backwards across the black void. Like a dream. Or a nightmare, I guess.
I thumb the hammer back.
"... do it, do it, do it... ."
As we bob and pitch closer and closer in the darkness, maybe twenty yards away now, our engine burbling like an old man choking on his own saliva, I see the weirdest frigging thing I've ever seen — and let me tell you, I've seen my share of weird shit. I realize there's a dark figure, pretty much in silhouette, standing up on the boat, standing near the rear outboard powerplant. I realize it's him. He's standing there like he's waiting for us. Dressed in the rags of a bloody shirt, his stringy, graying blonde hair tossing on the sea breeze, he's staring at us.
I raise the .357 at him.
"... do it, do it!... "
Now we're close enough to see the blood. It's spattered all around the bulwark of the speed boat. It looks like he tried to finger-paint words or symbols all over the seats and the deck, and I realize the glowing light from within is coming from about a thousand candles, and there's a moldering carcass of an animal near the stern, a dog or a sheep, dangling, flaccid and gutted, over the rail.
I aim at the Freak's face. The red dot of laser light touches his forehead.
"... DO IT!!... "
The son of a bitch smiles at me. The boats are close enough to spit on each other now. Behind me the GPS is beeping. My scalp is tingling.
The flickering light is shining off the Freak's face, and I'm close enough to see he's smiling at me. He's smiling and I can't fire.
I can't do it. I can't squeeze off a single shot. The trigger is impermeable like a tree trunk planted deep in the earth's core.
"KILL HIM!!"
I hear the kid's shriek ring out behind me, and then there's this black flash of movement. And before I know what's going on the kid is leaping over the bow of the Sea Ray and vaulting across the ten foot gap between the two boats. I scream at him at the top of my lungs: "BILLY!"
He lands awkwardly on the keel of the speedboat, his feet splashing, the air knocked out of his lungs. The impact makes the speedboat lurch, and sends the Freak staggering backward until he falls on his ass.
It all happens so quickly I don't even get a chance to make any moves before the Freak is crawling toward the kid. I slam down on the throttle, and the Sea Ray booms, and then it bucks in the water. The gun is still glued to my hand as the Sea Ray rams into the speedboat... tossing both vessels like dominoes... sending me sprawling across the bow... tangling the boats like train couplers locking... but it's too late now.
The Freak already has Billy in his clutches, and is pulling the kid up into the speedboat. Into the candlelight and sheep's blood.
The kid screams, and the Freak wraps his gnarled hands around the boy's neck, and the kid starts kicking and choking and making these weird mewling noises. And I know this is hard to believe but the Freak is smiling through all this. I'm back on my feet by this point and I've got the .357 in both hands now, and I'm standing on that rocking deck, gasping for breath, drawing a bead on that prick —
— and I still can't get one off, I just can't fire, I can't do it, my finger's like the Rock of Gibraltar on that trigger... right up until the moment I hear him speak. And then everything changes.
"What are you waiting for, friend?!" he calls out to me, and he's staring at me with that sick fish-belly smile, his unblinking eyes locked onto me while the kid's dying in his hands. And in that one crazy instant in the darkness, as the passage of time seems hang in front of me like a veil, I see something in the Freak's eyes that I hadn't noticed before. I wouldn't exactly call it suffering or pain... I guess the best word for it is torment... as he sneers his words at me: "Are you gonna do it or do I have to gut this dirty little mongrel open like a suckling pig?"
I empty the gun into him.
I don't really know what I'm doing at that point, I just squeeze and squeeze, the wet blasts popping open the humid air, the sparks like a photographer's strobe documenting my little moment of truth. The Freak's head turns to red mist. It's amazing. His hands still clutch the boy's neck beneath him long after his face is gone.
Then the clicking noise, and the gun is empty. The Freak sags backward and falls to the deck with a wet splat. My ears are ringing.
The silence seems to close down over us like a great black canopy.
I wish I could tell you the kid made it. I didn't blubber or anything. To be honest I wasn't really feeling much of anything at that point. I'm pretty much in shock by that point. But I hated boarding that slimy black casket of a boat. It's like hopping into a dead shark.
I work in the flickering candlelight, my hands shaking, brain like a frozen stone. I drag the kid's body over to the rail and pause for a second. His eyes are still open. Like a doll's eyes. What a god damn waste. I want to hug him. I want to say something but all I can do is toss him into the drink.
The kid barely makes a splash.
The rest of it goes fairly quickly. I toss in the Freak, toss my gun, kick the carcass over the side, and find a plastic gas jug in the aft storage compartment. I douse the bulwark, then hurl the tank into the Gulf. I pull my Zippo out and I'm about to torch the boat when I notice a little silver object lying up on the console by the steering column.
It's the Freak's cell phone, the one Ginny rigged with the transmitter bug.
I don't know why I didn't just leave it on the boat to burn with the rest of the shit but for some reason I feel compelled to f
ling the little silver gadget as far as I can out into the open sea. The thing arcs out into the night air, the moonlight flashing on it for a nano-second, and then... plop! The thing lands and sinks.
The guy at the boat yard told us one of the deepest parts of the Gulf is just a mile or so off shore. Said the Tarpin fisherman have to use military depth finders to locate it. I stand there for a moment, breathing hard and fast, soaked with sweat, imagining that cell phone plummeting down and down through that endless black murk.
I imagine it hitting the bottom.
Then I spark the rest of the boat and I'm out of there.
For a while I don't even realize I'm lost. A wall of humid fog has unexpectedly rolled in but I keep expecting the lights of the coast to materialize like a diamond necklace in the distance. But it never does. My only reference point is the orange spot of that burning speed boat on the horizon behind me but soon that's gone as well. I guess the thing has finally sunk or maybe just passed out of sight.
I inch along in the pea soup, blind and desperate, the Sea Ray gurgling and sputtering, for another hour or so — like I said, I'm not sure about lengths of time — until finally I realize that the green-toothed, hillbilly asshole put us out with half a tank of gas.
Now I'm running on fumes, and all can do is sit there with my hands glued to that greasy steering wheel, staring at the blanket of darkness in front me. Then the engine gives up the ghost. Now I'm just drifting, the boat pitching and yawing at the whim of the endless black Gulf of Mexico. The air is so thick and humid it feels like gauze on my face.
I think they call it 'dead calm,' something like that. Real funny. I'm drifting and drifting, lost in the night, and I'm dead calm. Ha ha, real ironic. But all I can think about in that lapping silence is the fact that the kid is dead, and I finally stepped over that imaginary line, finally committed the act.