by Chris Capps
"Sorry doc, I don't brush as often as I should," Chance said through his teeth as the doctor's latex covered finger pushed at his gums, "Have you taken up dentistry?"
"Only when it's part of an investigation," Rosario said, "Tell me, do you know what day it is?"
"Sunday," Chance said with confidence. Both the Sherriff and Jessica noticed that as Chance said it, Rosario mouthed the word, mimicking his patient, "Or maybe Monday."
"It's Tuesday," Rosario said candidly, "You missed some time. And before you ask, yes. You were only asleep for one night and one morning. Alright, no sign of scurvy. I'm going to assume the scurvy is not a result of the process."
"What process?" Chance asked, swinging his legs over the table and looking over toward the door. Willard was standing there with his hand on the door handle, completely still. It was as if he was trying to look invisible with his stillness. There was a look in his eye. A look that traced the floor tiles and then met the pilot head on. He smiled, and as he stepped through the door shook his head,
"It's really great to see you again, Chance. I didn't think I'd ever see you again after the crash."
"Crash?" Chance said, "What's Willard talking about?"
In the hallway, Willard couldn't stop grinning as he tossed the over-sweetened coffee into the trash can and rounded the corner to the automat vending machine. He fished in his pockets, eyeing the tiny glass door and the fruit inside it. It was an apple. Not as rich in vitamin C as an orange, but those had run out years ago. And as a tropical fruit, they didn't fare well outside of the most carefully cultivated greenhouses. It had been years since he had seen an orange.
"Excuse me," he heard over his shoulder at the front desk. It was a woman's voice, "I'm here to speak with the Sherriff. I recently saw something that I'd like to report anonymously."
"Andrea?" Willard called out leaning his hand on the vending machine. She looked up. He smiled. He hadn't seen Andrea in a long time outside of the butcher's shop, "It is Andrea, right?"
"Yes," she said. Something was wrong with her voice. Something Willard couldn't quite place his finger on.
"Andrea Newmann?" Willard stepped forward, his grin expanding, fueled by his own good mood. He stepped forward and he twisted the smile down a notch, pulling only the corners up in sympathy as he extended a hand, "Willard Nayfack. You remember me, right? I used to come by the butcher's shop when your husband stopped working there." She took his hand, shaking it. She was trembling, of course. She must have still been grieving over her dead daughter. What was that kid's name again?
"I remember," she said.
"I never got a chance to give you my condolences," Willard said taking her hand in both of his, "It's never easy to lose a loved one."
"Yes," Andrea said, pulling her hand back, "There's nothing more important than family."
"Agreed," Willard said, and his thumb was already over his shoulder, "Say, I'd hate to burden you, but you don't happen to have a dime do you? They want to talk to me about my sister for the next indefinite period of time and I seem to have spent my last one on a bad cup of instant coffee."
"Miss," the secretary behind the desk said placing a clipboard on the desk, "Please fill out this incident report and we will give it straight away to the Sherriff. He's going to be busy for the next few hours."
"Sure," Andrea said and quickly put her purse on the table to start fishing through it for change. Tossing aside empty candy wrappers from years ago, she felt her fingertips grasp a small coin and pulled it out. As she pulled her hand out she strained every muscle she had to stop shaking. As Willard closed his own hand around hers, he palmed the dime between them. She pulled away like he was a hot stove.
"I'll get you back the next time I see you," Willard said, his irreverent grin returning, "I'll drop by the butcher's shop at some point. Did you hear Chance Cooper's back? I might still have a job after all of this."
Trembling as Willard took a step backward, Andrea feigned her sweetest smile and picked up the clipboard. It knocked against her purse sending it clattering to the floor, spilling candy wrappers, change, makeup, and a small orange bottle of pills. Andrea watched as the pill bottle rolled across the floor, driven by impossible momentum toward Willard's boot. She dove to the ground without thinking, grasping for it on hands and knees as it cascaded toward him. Instantly it was out of her reach and it rolled.
Willard lifted his foot up and stepped on the bottle, stopping it. Her heart froze as he leaned down and picked it up with the same smile crossing his face. He picked it up and stared down at the bottle's label. Then he leaned down to her. They crouched, as if hiding from the police, now out of sight. The hair on top of Willard's head receded and he glanced up at her. He reached toward her with the bottle, shaking it like a rattle.
"Diazepam," he said, "Trouble sleeping?"
"I guess so," she whispered, snatching the bottle from him and plunging it back into her purse.
"I understand," he said putting a hand on her shoulder as he scooped up a pile of her spilled belongings onto a hard backed photograph of Delia. He held the photo over her purse, spilling the items in and then taking the photo, looking at it, "After what you've been through, I understand. Cute kid." Andrea avoided his eyes, picking up the last tube of lipstick and dropping it into the bag. He reached over and dropped the photo on top of it, patting her on the shoulder once, gently.
"Thank you," she said, choking the words out through her closing throat.
"But," Willard said, slitting his eyelids down like a fox, his voice dropping low in mock conspiracy, "you might want to get that prescription updated. That label says those pills expired a long time ago. Maybe that's why you're shaking so much right now." He rose to his feet and walked back, flipping the dime into the air, catching it and dropping it into the vending machine, "You have no idea how much this means to me. I'll pay you back soon." The door slid open, and he took the apple.
Real soon, bitch.
***
Five pine coffins lay in the grass of Cairo's Oak Lawn cemetery in a funeral service attended by virtually no one. Harry Tanhauser was there, but only because burial was one of the many professions that required use of his backhoe. He watched the procession with hat in hand, leaning against the metal treads and watching the four strange boxes he had brought over from the hospital.
Felix McCarthy was there because he felt some small connection to the deceased, having seen them previously lying in the morgue. Whether Chance Cooper had come back or not, there were still the matters of Rob Howell and Walter Garvey to consider, and after trespassing near them in the morgue, he felt it was only right.
Mike was there with his brother, looking over his shoulder into the mist and running over the events of the previous night in his mind. There were bound to be more funerals soon. Of that he had no doubt. Many more funerals.
"We therefore commit their bodies to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust - in sure and certain hope of," the Pastor paused as wind kicked the pages he was reading to the side. He held his thumb flat on the page and said, "the coming eternity of rest." He had changed that part at the last minute. Ordinarily, in this situation he would have said, 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.' It was a phrase he had been struggling with all night, at first not daring to break tradition. And yet here he was saying the wrong words. And he was doing it on purpose. "Mr. Tanhauser, please."
Tanhauser pulled levers on each of the harness systems holding the coffins. Each one in turn slowly descended into the ground topped with pink and golden flowers. Mike and Felix stood to leave, and Ritzer flagged them down with a gentle,
"Boys." They stopped, turning between them and stared. The pastor continued, "Thank you for coming. Cooper didn't have much of a family aside from Rob, and vice versa. And Walter Garvey, well, he became estranged from his father years ago."
"Of course, pastor," Felix said, "I never talked much to Cooper, but I get the feeling we'll become friends after this. I
'm surprised he didn't come to his own funeral."
"I would have," Mike said with a snort, "Except if it was as depressing as this, maybe not."
“Marco!” they heard drifting from the mist over them. It was a man’s voice, “Hey, Marco!”
“Do you know someone named Marco?” Mike asked smirking. The other two ignored him.
"I know it was unconventional. And maybe unnecessary. This is a bit outside of my area of expertise. And yet I felt it necessary. Whether he's back or not, these men are now dead. They suffered and died. And they should be remembered."
"Gives me a headache," Mike said, "I don't think I'm speaking out of turn on that one."
"No," Ritzer said with a chuckle, "I don't suppose so."
As they walked away, Harry Tanhauser cleared his throat and poked an unfiltered cigarette into his mouth. Afternoon funerals were a nightmare to schedule work around. If he didn’t need the money, he would have dropped this duty like a hot potato, shoveling it off on someone else who needed odd-work. Then again, he thought lighting the cigarette, Ritzer was already pulling duty on this funeral and the only other reliable day laborers he knew were either indisposed elsewhere today or contained in one of the boxes he was now lowering into the ground.
“So long, Rob. Walt,” he said, “And as for you, Mr. Cooper. I’ll see you around.” He walked back over to the backhoe, the machine lurking in the mist like a metal dinosaur, ready to claw the earth beneath it shut, to enclose those lost souls in sacred ground forever. Rind had already dropped by that morning with three deputies. They had been carrying a bag between them.
“What do I do with this?” he had asked.
“Burn it,” the Sherriff had said, “Don’t open it. Don’t look at it. Just burn it. And if you tell anybody about this, I’ll know.”
Of course Harry had let curiosity get the better of him. Even though the Sherriff was the law in town, he wasn’t about to dispose of a body for him without at least knowing who it was. The legality of the matter wasn’t the question. If Rind said it was legal, it was. But there was the ethical perspective to take into consideration. Of course he was surprised, but not as surprised as he had been a week prior when he opened the first bag and saw who it was.
Sherriff Rind, in the flesh. Both alive and dead now. Molly was bringing more duplicates of Sherriff Rind in, executing them, and disappearing. This latest body brought the tally up to two. Add to that the living Rind now interrogating a strangely resurrected Chance Cooper at the police station, and Harry was certain this would be a busy week. Then there was the helicopter he had read about in the Daily Finger this morning. He was certain he’d be hearing about that one soon enough too, and sworn equally to secrecy. Three burned helicopters were just as useless as none at all, but there was the added penalty of costing him more time.
And then there was the fire by the windmills. Melissa Novak had certainly survived, as Tanhauser had noted earlier in the day, seeing her at Scratchy’s Diner sitting in a booth behind Ned Daffy at breakfast. Her husband hadn’t been with her, but that wasn’t unusual. Maybe he was dead, though. And that made her single. Tanhauser reflexively ran his hand through his hair, stepping up onto the backhoe’s massive treads and checking his tobacco stained teeth in the rear view mirror. Adjusting it back, he noticed someone clinging to the side of the tractor, arms plastered against the yellow steel of the tractor engine. He turned his head, startled to see that she was slightly closer than she had appeared.
“Hey,” Tanhauser said, “Who’s that?”
“Please,” the girl said, clinging to the side of the vehicle and slowly moving toward him, “Help me.“ She was holding back tears, her hair matted and clinging close to her head. She was wearing glasses, a thin crack running along one of the lenses - bisecting his view of her reddened eye. Her dirt cached shirt was ripped at the shoulder, pulled down to the mid-length of her arm. There was a small thin trail of blood from a cut that had gone black, “Who are you?”
“I’m Harry Tanhauser,” Harry said, “Who the hell are you?“ The voice was familiar. He stepped forward, blinking heavily in the thick fog, trying to get a good look at her face. And he saw it with his legs suddenly ready to take off running, “It‘s you.”
“Please,” she said. There was a piteous sincerity to her voice. One that appealed to Harry’s warm blooded nature. She was a girl in trouble. She shuffled a foot forward uneasily, “My leg. Please.”
Harry looked down and saw the leg she was trailing behind her. Blood was spilling freely from behind the knee. She stepped again, losing her footing and collapsing onto the tractor tread. Her dirty hands clawed up the ridges of the track, pulling her up. Harry, against his every whim, dove to help her up.
“Be careful, girl!” he shouted, lifting her easily into his arms, cradling her as she sobbed now into his shoulder.
“Whoever you are, take me to the hospital,” she said, “Please.”
Harry looked down at the girl as blood loss began to pull her from consciousness. He laid her down on the tractor tread, and opened the door to the backhoe, reaching for the small first aid kit tucked under the seat. Within seconds he was wrapping the wound behind her knee in cotton wadding. He pulled the bandage tape around her, yanking it up to his teeth and tearing it to make an improvised field dressing. With the bleeding stifled, he turned his attention to her shoulder and poured rubbing alcohol on the wound to sterilize it.
“Sorry about this,” he said wincing as he watched the clear liquid pass over her wound. She barely reacted. She was only partially conscious. But she was conscious enough to say one final word weakly as she saw a shape emerging from the fog,
“No.”
Tanhauser turned his attention from the wound, placing gauze and pressure on it, and looked over his shoulder. There she was again, standing at the edge of the fog, a bottle in her hand with a rag dripping from its top. Tanhauser looked from the Molly standing in front of him, perfectly clean and groomed, without so much as a scratch on her, and the Molly that lay shivering on the treads of his backhoe.
“Give her to me,” the standing Molly said producing a flip-top cigarette lighter from her pocket and flicking it in one hand, “Give her to me or you burn to death.”
Tanhauser looked down at the girl laying on the treads of his backhoe. Her eyes were wide open, and she was gulping for air. She was pale, shivering. Her head twitched back and forth slightly. She was shaking her head, the mist in her eyes sliding down the side of her cheek.
Tanhauser thought about the first shipment the Sherriff had dropped off next to his shack. It was a bag smelling of burned meat. He had been told, just as he would be again later to burn it without looking inside. He remembered standing over the bag after the Sherriff left, unzipping it, and seeing the tragedy of charred flesh wearing a barely touched human head. It was something that would follow him in dreams for the rest of his life. Black skin crackled and peeled back revealing bone and holes where moisture had expanded to pop fat and sizzle out.
“You know what this is,” the standing Molly said, passing the lighter under the bottle‘s fuming wick. It caught easily, arcing and expanding with thick drops of liquid fire spilling over the edge, “And you know what it does. Hand her over or the Sherriff’s going to have to find someone else to take out the trash at the end of the d-”
Tanhauser had already lunged forward, catching the Molotov holding Molly off guard. She grunted bodily as Tanhauser, who had never been quite athletic enough to get off the bleachers at the football games, made his first tackle in years. The cocktail spun backward, toppling onto the grass. But it didn’t break. Instead, the wick dislodged and a thin stream of fire pumped out onto the grass, descending down an improvised irrigation trail and harmlessly pouring into the open grave of Walter Garvey, onto his coffin where pink and gold flowers lit up like fireworks.
As soon as she had been disarmed, Harry got up off of Molly, taking a few steps backward and puffing air in and out of his cigarette ruined lungs.
He sat back on the conveyer track where the other one, the unconscious Molly, was laying. He pulled the medical tape out of the first aid kit again, glancing at the eyes that glared at him from the edge of the mist. As they breathed, he finished wrapping the wounded girl's shoulder, glancing up at her duplicate from time to time.
“So she’s good, then,” Harry said finally, huffing as he picked his shovel up from where it stood, stuck into the ground, “That’s why you’re murdering her?”
He watched the muscles of the girl standing before him. She was tensing up, as if to suddenly lunge forward once again. And then he heard someone yelling in the distance. It was a man’s voice,
“Marco!” It sounded again after a pause, “Marco!”
She stopped, turning into the mist and disappearing. Harry scanned the area tensely, darting his tongue over his lips as his eyes twitched from place to place. Smoke was now billowing from the grave of Walter Garvey, as were thick flames. Tanhauser picked the unconscious girl up off of his backhoe, and carried her to his milspec loading truck. She laid next to him, her head resting on his shoulder as he fired up the engine. Harry didn’t hear her, because the engine was roaring at full blast as he drove back into town, but the nearly unconscious Molly Nayfack sitting next to him did say something before they got to Doctor Rosario’s home,
“Thank you.”
“Marco!” Willard called out, stumbling over a grave stone as he walked deeper into the mist at Oak Lawn cemetery, “Seriously! Marco!” He was losing his patience.
“Polo,” he heard a gentle voice say. There she was. Willard grinned and ran over to his big sister, embracing her warmly.
“You had me worried,” he said. It had stopped bothering him years ago that he was now much older than Molly, and that she was showing no signs that she would ever age, “That Sherriff is out for your blood. He’s losing it.”
“Good,” Molly said grinning, “We’re learning more about him every day.”