by Dale Bailey
—blood, Finney’s blood, the pink froth at his lips—
—tacky under his finger.
Evans yanked the door open.
Nick stood, grateful for the chill air. Everything ached. His head, his shoulders and arms. His heart.
Evans jerked his chin at the townhouse. “Anybody home?”
“Nobody.” He could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “They’re all dead.”
Evans pushed him, propelling him up the walk. “I’m right behind you,” he said.
The whole time, Nick’s mind was working, trying to find an angle. He could dart into the kitchen, seize a knife—
Laughable. Evans would gun him down before he even figured out where Finney kept the knives. Black despair rolled through him. Laughable to think he could escape, laughable to think he could save them, any of them. The dead mocked him. Tucker, Finney—
—was he, could he be alive?—
—even Sue, not dead yet, but soon. Soon.
Me, too, he thought. Soon.
He couldn’t remember if he had locked the door. A nightmarish dread that he would have to go through Finney’s pockets possessed him. Or worse, that Evans would go back to dig up the keys himself, discovering Finney barely alive, his hand clutching that single spilled bullet.
He ransacked his memory frantically, trying to recall those last moments at the townhouse. But they were a blur: the somehow inconsequential weight of Pomeroy cradled between them, the Torkelson pissing into the shrubs three doors down. Then, even as the door knob gave under his hand, he recalled running back inside to retrieve the private eye’s Stetson, swinging the door shut unlocked behind him.
Now, it opened silently. Within, darkness retreated. Their shadows nailed themselves to the parquet tile and the carpeted hallway beyond. Nick stepped inside, the trooper at his heels, prodding him forward with the gun.
Evans closed the door. He turned the deadbolt, the tongue whispering thunderously into its groove in the silence of the empty apartment.
Gloom swallowed their shadows. Dim apertures opened in three directions. Kitchen to the right, bathroom to the left, the hallway straight ahead, opening into a space gray with diffused sunlight, the door onto the deck a brilliant square behind the blinds.
It was ice-cold. Another detail from the night before floated back to claim him: the six-shooter detonating in Pomeroy’s hand, the blinds swinging as the sliding glass door beyond blew out.
Evans lifted his hand. The gun was a blue shadow in the surrounding dark. “Where’s the key, college boy?”
Nick swallowed. “There’s no key.”
The gun swung toward him. “What do you mean?”
“There’s no key. I have the tape, though. Right here.” He gestured at the bathroom door, half-baked plans forming and dissipating in his mind, substanceless as smoke. Maybe he could knock the tape from the vanity, spinning in the same motion to drive a knee into Evans’s balls.
Evans took a step back, leveled the gun at him.
Maybe not.
“Open the door slowly, turn on the light, and step away,” he said.
Swallowing, Nick opened the door.
Darkness welled out of the bathroom, impenetrable.
Steeling himself, he reached inside and snapped on the light. The planet cracked open, plunging him into a strange, new world.
The tape was gone.
Tuesday, 12:47 to 1:51 PM
Nick stared dumbfounded at the empty vanity. He even reached out and ran his fingers across the smooth countertop, as if the tape might be there after all, his trauma-stunned brain playing tricks on his eyes. Memory slotted onto a reel, unspooling inside his head: Finney fumbling the tape onto the vanity and turning to face him, swinging shut the door.
“What the fuck?” he whispered to himself.
And that was when he saw the dead woman.
She had been flung into the bathtub, sweeping the black shower curtain part way off its rings. A kid’s sleeping bag half-enshrouded her, and for a moment Nick could not tear his eyes away from it. Scooby Doo and Shaggy stared back at him, their faces twisted into exaggerated expressions of dismay as a luminescent pirate lurched toward them, arms outstretched. In one hand Shaggy clutched an enormous sandwich; with the other, he fended off a terrified Scooby.
Then the rest of the tableau cascaded over him in a gut-wrenching wave: the blood-streaked tub and the dead woman crumpled inside it, a bottle blonde wearing a red, fuck-me dress, her brown eyes vaucously agog, her face upturned beneath the dripping faucet. On her left hand, splayed palm up at the bottom of the tub, a wedding band glinted. Her dress had ridden up over her thighs, exposing a scalloped edge of red panties. One bare leg dangled over the rim of the tub, a red stilleto heel clinging precariously to the narrow foot.
Evans was a step ahead of him.
“Somebody here,” he grunted, even as Nick was still putting the pieces together: the tire tracks, the Pinto jutting crazily over the curb three doors down, the woman. Someone, all right, Nick thought. But who?
Evans spun warily, Nick forgotten. He jabbed the gun toward the hall.
“Who’s there?”
“Just me, motherfucker,” someone said from the kitchen, only it sounded more like jest me, mothahfuckah to Nick.
Evans turned too late. Flame licked out in the darkened kitchen and Nick heard an oddly muffled whump, the sound of someone firing a pistol buried in throw pillows. Evans flung out his arms and staggered into the bathroom, a marionette shorn of guide wires. His pistol clattered to the parquet floor as another shot went off, this one a little louder.
Nick didn’t get out of the way in time. Evans careened into him, dead weight. They went over backward into the tub, the shower curtain tearing free of its remaining rings with a sound—
—pop-pop-pop—
—that Nick at first took for gunfire. He smacked his head hard against the opposite wall. Light blossomed behind his eyes, and then the dead woman reached up to embrace him. A split second later Evans landed on top of him.
Breath burst out of him. His lungs clutched desperately to drag in air. Darkness edged his vision.
Panicked, he writhed. Evans slid partly off his chest, relieving the pressure. Nick wriggled farther away, dragging in grateful lungfuls of air. He ended up face to face with the dead blonde. Her mouth hung open, revealing lightly blood-stained teeth. The room stank of shit and urine. For a starkly humiliating moment, Nick thought he had pissed himself. Then he realized that Evans was dead, that he had voided his bowels, his kidneys.
“That’s far enough,” someone said—
—thass fah enuff—
—and again it took Nick a moment to fit the words together.
The shooter stopped in the dark frame of the doorway.
A kid, Nick thought. A fucking kid, holding an abnormally long-barreled pistol in one hand, a drink in the other. He stood maybe five-five and wore the cast-off clothes of a man: a black sweater with the sleeves pushed above his elbows, a pair of paint-stained blue jeans rolled up at the ankles and cinched tight about his waist with a braided leather belt.
Another step brought him full into the light.
“Not handy enough by far with that fuckin poker are you, son?”
Nick gasped like a man gut-punched, recognizing in the same breath the clothes—
—Finney’s, he painted his bedroom in those jeans—
—and the man who wore them.
Ernie Pomeroy.
He had plastered those long strands of hair back across his bald pate, and taped a clumsy gauze bandage across his shattered nose, but he still looked like hell: eyes bloodshot with weariness, a purple-black bruise blossoming beyond the edges of the bandage. Enflamed red lines stood out on one cheek, like someone had scratched him.
He sipped at his drink.
“I feel like hell, son, but your friend’s liquor has gone a fair piece toward restorin me.”
He took another drink, set the glass atop the va
nity, and hunkered down. Wincing, he stood, holding Evans’s .45 up to the light. “Ain’t really a pistol is it? A fuckin hand cannon, what it is.” He tucked it under his belt, waving his own pistol, the barrel enclosed in some kind of wire baffle. “Silencer,” he said. “Make sure we won’t have any company right away. Had it in the trunk. Couple a pistols, too. You kids are sorry fuckin killers, all I can say. Next time you decide to kill someone, you might want to make sure he’s dead fore you go dumpin him in the drink, friend. Maybe see how deep the water is too. Live and learn I always say.” He extended the pistol toward Nick and squinted down the barrel. “Learn, anyway.”
“No,” Nick said. “Wait.”
“Oh, sure. Me and you, son, we’re gonna pow-wow. After that, we’ll see.”
Nick started to struggle out of the tub.
Pomeroy waved the pistol. “Slowly, now.”
Nick moved slowly. As he scrambled out of the tub, he stole a glance at the Rolex. 12:53. Just over an hour left.
“Please—”
“Shut up.” Pomeroy tapped his fingers against something tucked under the waistband of his jeans, a sound like a dog’s claws tapping on a ceramic tile floor. “I got the tape now, son. I got the tape and I got the gun, and you’re gonna do just as I say, understand?”
Nick swallowed, nodding.
Behind him, one of the bodies settled with a sound like air from a slow-leaking tire.
“Goddamn woman went wild on me,” Pomeroy said, lifting a hand to his face. “All I wanted was her car. Didn’t want to shoot her. A Pinto. Can you believe it, she died for a damn Pinto.” His eyes had grown unfocused, regretful, his voice slurred from alcohol.
Nick tensed, his hands flexing. He inched forward as another lost second blazed across his brain, like a comet across a black, black sky. Pomeroy must have sensed his thoughts. He lifted the gun, fixing his eyes on Nick.
“You plannin to go around whackin people with pokers, I got some lessons for you on how to be a killer.” Without looking away from Nick, he dug in his back pocket. A moment later his hand emerged with a switch blade. Nick’s mind spun back to Evans, the bone-handled knife he had pressed to Sue’s neck, to Casey Nicole Barrett’s neck before her. But this was a plainer blade with a handle of black plastic. Pomeroy tossed it at Nick’s feet and it clattered, spinning, on the parquet floor.
“You kill a trooper, cops be all over it like stink on shit. You killed one of their own. I been real careful, wiped everything down but the bottle and this here glass, and I’m plannin to take them with me.”
“Please,” Nick whispered. “Sue …”
“We’ll talk about your little girlfriend in a minute, son. First things first. Damn forensics get you every time, so what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna take that knife and do a little impromptu surgery on these folks, if you know what I mean. Smart kid like yourself ought to know some surgery.”
“No—”
“Three bullets, one in the blonde, two in your big friend there. That’s all. Then we’ll get on the road.”
“No, please …”
Pomeroy leveled the gun and smiled.
“Best get to it, son.”
12:59.
Nick got Evans by the boots and lugged his inert mass to the far side of the tub. Then he hunkered over the blonde. He threw back the dismayed faces of Shaggy and Scooby Doo, revealing the blue interior lining, all the time wondering about the kid, the way he would feel when he found out that his mom had been slaughtered and dumped in a stranger’s bathtub, wrapped like a side of beef in his cartoon sleeping bag.
Nick swallowed.
He jabbed the blade through the shiny fabric of the red dress where it bunched up at the blonde’s pubic bone and slid it north. With trembling fingers, he peeled the twin panels of cheap material to either side, revealing smooth flesh of tanning-bed bronze. Her underwear was impractical. Stroke-book lingerie: a high-cut red thong and matching bra, her nipples like delicate scalloped shells beneath the lace. Everyday stuff? some distant part of his mind wondered. For the husband her wedding ring implied, or for someone else, a lover maybe? The mere idea shunted his thoughts into agonizing channels—the stolen hint of a strange cologne, a glimpse of crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray of Sue’s car, his fears about Finney and Sue. And something worse, a vision of Finney’s body crumpled in the trunk of the cruiser, useless as a rag doll, his hand closing reflexively around the spilled bullet, finally and irrevocably dead. Had to be, Nick thought, remembering that pink froth coating his best friend’s lips. He had to be dead.
The word tolled like a funereal bell inside his mind.
Dead. Out of my jealousy, my insecurity—
His bowels twisted.
He had failed Finney. Had failed his friend. He glanced at the Rolex—
—1:08—
—and picked up the knife, knowing he had no time to wallow in guilt, not now, not if he were to save Sue. And yet still he hesitated.
“Can I have some gloves? I think Finney kept some under the sink.”
“You worried bout the AIDS, son?”
Nick stared dumbly into the blonde’s expressionless face.
“That’s the least of your worries. You live long enough to die of the AIDS, you can thank God in his sweet Heaven above you.”
Nick stared down at the blonde. He slid the blade between her breasts, flicked it upward. The elastic bra strap gave way with a little pop and the lacy shells fell back. The bullet had gone into her left breast, right where the heart would be on an anatomy chart. You couldn’t ask for a better shot. The hole was a little larger than a quarter, its perimeter torn, the flesh bruised and blackened. Nick had expected more blood.
“Good thing about a little bitty caliber like this,” Pomeroy said, “it don’t make a mess of things. That trooper of yours with his damn hand cannon, he lacked finesse. Bullet go right through someone, splatter em all over the wall and you don’t got a chance of diggin it out. Man uses a gun like that lacks confidence in his own abilities.”
Click!
Another sweep of the second hand, another moment flying into the maw of the past.
“If we don’t get back to Gutman’s by two,” Nick said, “they’re going to start taking her fingers.”
“Who’s that?”
“Sue. Remember Sue?”
Still Nick could not look away from the dead woman in the tub. Before his eyes, the white-trash features shifted, metamorphosed into Sue’s patrician face, the bleach blonde hair transforming itself into soft, copper tresses.
“You should of thought of that fore you picked up that poker, son. I was willin to work a deal.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I’m aimin to, but first you need to get cuttin.”
Nick didn’t answer.
He remembered his father, hunkering over a fresh kill in the bayou woods, long years before he came home crippled in a chair. Dawn had just begun to print itself across the horizon, the barren trees black as Japanese ideograms against the graying sky. His father had laid a hand across the buck’s heaving shoulder, still gushing hot life, and pulled from its sheath the Bowie knife that had been his father’s before him, and which someday might have been Nick’s if things had turned out differently. He cut the buck’s throat with a single stroke. Then, working with the sure touch of a man who felt more at home in the woods than anywhere else—a man who shrank from the bookish and the learned which he called feminine—Frank Laymon set about showing his youngest boy how to gut a deer.
Nick stared down at the blonde’s exposed torso.
The fiery second hand of the Cadillac’s clock—
—time is everything—
—everything is time—
—blurred through his mind once again.
He bounced the knife lightly in one hugely swollen palm, that childhood hallucination sweeping back to claim him once again; he tested the edge with his thumb.
The blade was sharp.
He too
k a deep breath and leaned over the blonde.
The secret, Nick discovered, was not to think of that deer he had watched his dad gut all those years ago—not to think of the blonde as a once-living creature at all.
When he was a kid, just four or five years old, it was hard to remember, Nick had gotten this game, Operation. The game board was shaped like a desexed little man with a tiny, red light bulb for a nose; his body had been punctured here and there with metal-rimmed crevices in which tiny plastic bones had been secreted. The object of the game was to “operate” with a pair of metal tweezers, removing the bones without touching the metal rims of their cradles, closing an electrical connection that set the red nose to blinking in conjunction with this horrible metallic buzz. He couldn’t remember where he had gotten the game—maybe from Goodwill where his mom found a lot of their stuff, maybe from Jake or Sam, who no doubt stole it from some richer, more timid kid—but it hadn’t been complete, or so he had recalled years later at the Torkelsons, when one of the twins had produced a mint-condition gameboard as an event in what they had talked up around campus as a drinking Olympics, with medals to be awarded in funneling, quarters, beer pong, and surgery.
All those years later, Nick had felt a surge of jealousy as he looked down at the Torkelsons’ deluxe Operation, still in its original box, complete with all its plastic bones and unfrayed stacks of play money and game cards. By the time Nick had gotten his version, the money and game cards had all been lost, and maybe half the plastic bones replaced with toothpicks cut to size. And yet for all that it remained one of the touchstones of his childhood, one of the few memories of his mother he retained at all.
When they had played, exactly, or why he did not know. But for once they had been blessedly alone—his dad at the rigs, Jake and Sam off on some brutish teenage errand—and Nick had had his mother all to himself. He could still recall the way her wavy, chestnut hair fell over her face as she knelt over the game board, the way she had brushed it away with a movement as deft as it was unconscious. Even then, only a kid, he had known that she was beautiful. Not till later—too late—would he understand that she had been lost: married to a man because of the child he had kindled in her womb. He must have seemed brutish to her, Nick had thought, newly risen from the jungle. And in her turn, she must have seemed to him like some kind of alien being, an interloper from a world where people had jobs that required them to wear ties, where people owned stocks and bonds and season tickets to the theater instead of the Saints: a breathing reproach of the life he had been born to.