Deviations (21 page)

They know all about something that happened in a
particular town six miles northwest of Warsaw in April 1943. They know about it
because it was written up in an article that only a dozen people got to read
because the article was so hard-hitting it would’ve brought down the government
of the U.S., England, France, and (of course) Lithuania, so these other Jews
got together with some Catholic priests who were unhappy about something that
happened in 1646 and they killed the guy who wrote the article and blew up all
the trucks carrying the article, and that’s exactly why the world is fucked-up
in the exact way it’s obviously fucked-up today.

This guy was calm because he knew what he had to
do. He turned to Fat Ricky. “Get out,” he said.

Ricky left the room, closing the door behind him.

Then he said, “Take your clothes off.”

I stood there, motionless.

He walked over to me slowly. His right hand came
up so fast I didn’t see it. The force of the blow knocked me off balance, and I
fell sideways, knocking over one of the chairs and crashing into the card
table. I wasn’t sure if he’d broken my jaw, but I knew he was the one who’d
killed Dolores Weston.

“I said take your clothes off.”

I did it, quickly.

He pointed to the mattress.

I walked over to it.

“Face down,” he said.

I turned my face to the wall and lay there.

He walked over to my side. His hands grabbed my
hips, and he pulled my ass up into the air. I was on my knees, my head still
facing the wall. The mattress shifted as he got on. I heard him lower his fly.
I felt his hands start to push my thighs apart.

I resisted.

He walked over to my side. In an instant, his foot
came up into my ribcage.

I felt a searing pain as something cracked inside
me.

He went back behind me and pushed my thighs apart.

He thrust into me hard, like he wanted to tear me
up inside, like he wanted me to know there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

I already knew that. With the back of my head
throbbing and my ribs shooting out sparks of pain, it was all I could do to
keep from passing out. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on the log wall two
feet away. It was gray now with age, cracks showing in the surface. There were
trowel marks in the plaster between each log and the one above it and below it,
as if the guy was giving it a swirly artistic look. But the plaster between two
logs on the same row didn’t have any trowel marks, like he’d come along with a
wet rag while it was setting up and smoothed it out. My body finally stopped
moving, and the guy pulled out.

I kept looking at the wall. I heard the guy walk
over to the door and open it. “You want her?” he said to Ricky. Ricky did.

Chapter 20

A paper cut can make you
miserable—at least for the first few minutes—the way all your attention focuses
in on that tiny stinging part of your finger. Right now, my attention had no
place to focus because too many places hurt. The back of my head, where I’d
been hit, probably with the butt of a pistol or a rifle, worried me the most. I
knew I had at least a concussion. My face and my hands were ripped up from me being
dragged across the cement floor. My jaw ached, and I was missing a tooth on my
lower left side. My ribcage sent out sharp flares of pain with each breath. My
ankle was sore, and my legs hurt.

The murderer had raped me hard. All rape is
violence, of course, and this one was no exception. But it wasn’t about rage
with this guy. He wasn’t making me pay for all the women who’d mistreated him,
or anything that ordinary and pathetic. It was more like when a guerilla army in
Africa or someplace pulls into some town and they rape all the women and girls
to make them understand the natural order of things. Our tribe is stronger than
your tribe, or else how could we come in here and do this to you? And if we get
any of you pregnant, that’s a bonus because we’re putting our genes into you,
destroying your tribe. It’s really business, you see. It’s not like we’re
getting any pleasure out of it.

That’s why he raped me from behind. So I don’t
have a face. Only people have faces.

That’s what it was with this murderer. He knew
from Ricky I was a cop, but that wasn’t why he raped me. It was about Dolores
Weston. Not primarily that I wanted to put him away. I sensed that he’d be okay
martyring himself to his glorious cause. What he couldn’t tolerate was me not understanding
why she deserved to die, why killing her was the only way to put things back in
balance. So I was just some woman from the wrong tribe, a mutation that had to be
eliminated from the body politic.

That’s what I was thinking, anyway, although I
have to admit I wasn’t thinking all that well. I did know that my crotch was
pretty bloody, and it hurt like hell.

Last few years, with my drinking, the anonymous sex,
and losing my family, I’d been headed right toward this place. Sitting on a
cement floor, ankles roped together, hands tied behind me, leaning against the
wooden wall in a cold, dank room in a neo-Nazi compound, I had reached the end
of the line. I was now completely powerless. But it would not be long. They’d
see to that. Through the pain, knowing I had to endure only a few hours more, I
breathed freely for the first time in many years.

* * * *

After a while, I was able
to talk Ricky into letting me get dressed.

“Someone guarding the Reverend now, Ricky?” I asked
him.

He just looked at me.

“You told me yesterday that someone’s with him 24/7.
You’re here. Is there someone there?”

I didn’t see any guilt or remorse on his face—no
human emotion of any kind, really. Guilt would call for a brain at least as big
as a dog’s, and I just didn’t see it in Ricky. He’d have to be able to think or
at least know in some way that an action was right or wrong. We had a case
about five or eight years ago where this middle-aged guy with a 55 IQ killed
his mother one day when she pissed him off somehow. The court found him
incompetent and put him in an institution. Ricky had the same look on his face:
he was so deep-down stupid that when you took him out of his element, which was
watching cartoons on the black-and-white TV in Christopher Barry’s living room,
he was too confused to be held responsible for what happened next.

“Someone’s there with him,” Ricky said. He turned
his face away from me when he said it.

My son, Tommy, used to do that when he was eight
and I caught him lying. I made a mistake telling Tommy how I knew, and he
learned how to mask it. Nobody had told Ricky, or he wasn’t sharp enough to
learn.

I wanted to get as much information as I could
from him before the murderer came back into the room. Yesterday, Ricky’s world
was peaceful and well-balanced, but something must have upset that stability.
There were only three possibilities for that something: me, Nick Corelli, or
the murderer.

“Did it bother you that I talked to the Reverend
Barry yesterday?”

He shrugged his shoulders, still looking away.

“Last night, when that man came—you know, the one
in the suit and tie?—were you there in the house with the Reverend Barry when
that man came to talk to him?”

He was facing the wall, but I could see him nod
his head.

“Did you like that man, Ricky?”

He turned to face me. “No,” he said.

“Why didn’t you like him?”

“Because he argued with the Reverend.”

“He made the Reverend get mad?”

“Yeah, I don’t like to see the Reverend get mad.
When he gets red in the face, he starts coughing and he has to sit down.”

“Do you know what they were arguing about, Ricky?”

“Somebody got killed.”

“Do you know who got killed?”

He put his hands up to his temples. “I don’t
know,” he said. “I get confused when they talk fast.”

“Do you know if it was a man or a woman who got
killed, Ricky?”

“You shut up or I’ll gag you.”

“All right, Ricky. Take it easy. I’ll be quiet.”

My wrist hurt from the rope digging in. I don’t
remember who tied me up, but he did it tight. My arms and shoulders were
getting real sore, deep in the muscles. Ricky walked over to the card table and
sat on one of the folding chairs. I let him sit for a few minutes.

“Do you have a father, Ricky?”

He looked down at his hands on the card table.
“No,” he said.

“I guess the Reverend Barry is kinda like your
father, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I love the Reverend Barry.”

“Who is the other man, Ricky? You know, the other
man who was in the room here with you and me? What’s his name?”

“His name is Leonard.”

“Do you know his last name?”

He shook his head no.

“Did the Reverend Barry tell you to help Leonard?”

Ricky shook his head again. “Leonard told me the
Reverend said I should help him.”

“Okay.” Ricky was looking a little agitated, so I
decided to stay silent for a while. I didn’t know what time it was, maybe early
afternoon. “Ricky, I haven’t eaten in a long time. Do you think you could go
over to the house and get me some food? Just some bread or something?”

He shook his head no. “Can’t do that.”

“Why is that, Ricky? I’m really hungry.”

“Leonard told me to stay here and watch you.”

“Does Reverend Barry know I’m here?”

“Leonard told me the Reverend Barry is doing
something very important and I’m supposed to stay away from him. Just watch you
and do what Leonard says.”

“Okay, I understand.”

I tried to add up what I got from Ricky. Nick
Corelli and Reverend Barry were fighting about something, but I already knew
that from watching the picture window in the living room. The subject was a
murder, but Ricky didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. So I didn’t know
if it was Dolores Weston or Willson Fredericks—or both of them.

I was getting no closer to understanding what was
happening. Was Willson Fredericks killed for the reason he had told me and
Ryan: that the patriots wanted to keep him quiet now that we were looking at him?
Did he have information that would threaten the Montana Patriot Front? Did
Corelli kill him? Was that what the fight with Reverend Barry was about? Did
Corelli do it without the Reverend’s authorization? Or was Corelli the boss,
coming out to the boonies here to make sure things didn’t get out of control?

And who was Leonard? I was certain, without any
evidence, of course, that he had killed Dolores Weston. The way he hit me
before he raped me—the suddenness, the absolute lack of any human feeling, from
anger to fury—he was Weston’s killer. I could see him taking a rock and carving
1488 on her chest. And the incredible force of his right hand. With just his
open palm he’d taken out one of my teeth. Give him a brick and I’d be dead now.

But I couldn’t get a read on his relationship with
Reverend Barry. Was he the Reverend’s rough boy? Did he kill Willson
Fredericks, too? Did the Reverend okay him and Ricky picking me up and raping
me? Or was Leonard operating on his own? He could be one of the faithful Nazis who
hangs around out here, in which case Ricky would know him. That way, when he
comes up to Ricky and says the Reverend wants him to hang with Leonard, Ricky
would do it, no questions asked. Ricky doesn’t ask questions.

X
+
y
+
z
= 1488. There was
no way I’d be able to solve this one unless I could get out of this room, but I
had complete confidence that Ricky was up to the task of preventing that, me
being tied up and beat up, him being more than twice my weight.

Leonard opened the door and stepped into the room.
He looked at me, then at Ricky. “Everything okay in here?” he said to him.
Ricky just nodded.

“Leonard,” I said.

He turned his head slowly to me. “You think that’s
my name?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Why is that?” he said to me.

“Ricky and I’ve been talking.”

Leonard nodded his head, like he was giving me
some points for having the brains to try to learn what I could from the idiot.
He walked over to Ricky. “I want you to leave this room, now, Rick,” he said to
him.

Ricky didn’t look worried or offended or anything.

“And from now on, you don’t say anything to her,
okay? You talk only to me. That’s what the Reverend wants.”

Ricky nodded, got up, and left the room, closing
the door behind him.

“You want to talk?” Leonard said to me as he sat
in one of the folding chairs.

“Yes, I do. There’s some things I’d like to
understand before you kill me.”

“I’m going to kill you?”

“That’s my guess. You’re not gonna rape a cop,
then let her live. Plus, you took off my blindfold. So either you’re pretty
confident the other cops will never track you down, or I’m not walking out of
here.”

“You haven’t considered one other possibility.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“That there aren’t any cops who’d be willing to
help you track me down, or even believe you were raped.” He did have a point:
for all I knew, he might have more buddies on the force than I did. He could be
on the job. A decorated member of the Lake Hollow Police Department.

“Okay, so why don’t we move this along? You let me
walk out of the compound, give me a couple hours head start, and we’ll see what
happens. If you’re up for it, I mean.”

He pulled my ID card out of his shirt pocket. “To
be perfectly honest, Detective Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department,” he
said, looking at my ID, “I’m not interested in playing games with you. Maybe
you could track me down. I know I could track you down. But the fact is, unfortunately,
you were right the first time. I am going to kill you.”

I had known this since he’d conked me on the head
out behind the big rock just north of the compound. And throughout everything
they’d done to me since that moment, I hadn’t forgotten it. The effect it had
on me was to make me super aware of what was happening. Which makes sense: you’ve
got only a few hours left, you want to use them productively. For that reason,
even though I’d held open the possibility of getting the hell out of here if
the chance presented itself, mostly I’d been thinking of fully experiencing
these last few hours.

So hearing him say he was going to kill me didn’t
shock me, didn’t make my heart thump in terror, didn’t make me start crying or
pleading for my life. What it did was make me intent on figuring out what was
going on. I figured he owed me that.

“When you killed Dolores Weston, why’d you dump
her in the industrial park? And what the hell did you carve on her chest?”

He looked a little disappointed that I was
pretending to not understand what the symbols meant. “Ricky will be back in a
minute, then we’re going to kill you. You want to waste your remaining time
talking about things you already know?”

“So you killed Dolores Weston because she wanted
to let that pharmaceutical company build a facility in Rawlings? What’s so
wrong with that?”

“Maybe I should make clear the terms of our
discussion,” he said. “I’m willing to provide some information, but I’m not
interested in debating you.”

“Okay, let me ask the question a different way. Did
you kill Dolores Weston because she wanted to let that pharmaceutical company
build a facility in Rawlings?”

“Thank you,” he said. He was a rapist and murderer,
but you couldn’t accuse him of being rude. “Yes, that is correct. That company
has spent a considerable amount of money in New Jersey lobbying on behalf of
human cloning, euthanasia, and various other practices that violate God’s will.
I do not have time to explain to you which people they intend to clone,
although you might want to scan the list of their board of directors for clues,
and which people they intend to euthanize. Senator Weston was inconsequential.
I held no personal animus toward her. She was a non-entity. However, she
represented the lack of courage that pervades our modern state.”

“Help me understand that.”

“She was a prostitute, willing to do or say
anything in order to satisfy her obscene lust for money. In exchange for
payoffs, she was willing to enable that company—that unholy union of Jews and
non-Christians from around the world—to spread its tentacles to this portion of
the country.”

“Since she was a prostitute, you raped her.”

“Since she was a prostitute, it wasn’t rape.”

I saw nothing to be gained by asking him why he
raped me. “You do know that after the death of her husband, her estate was
estimated at three billion dollars?”