Ghouls (36 page)

“You mean Chief Bard.”

“Yeah, Chief Lard. He said Higgins will be by to pick you up.”

“Pick me up for what?” The now-common annoyance prickled him. Melissa’s messages were always like this—incomplete.

“How should I know?” she said, face still glued to the TV screen. “I don’t work for the police department.” She stopped to giggle. “But then neither do you, for that matter.”

“Funny,” he said. He could strangle her. It was one subject he didn’t want mentioned in front of Vicky. He heard tires pull up outside and spied the town cruiser through the window.

“Your ride’s here,” Vicky said. “How’s that for perfect timing?”

“I shouldn’t be too long.”

Vicky smiled. “I can watch Mark Goddard with Melissa. We’ll fix you something good for dinner.”

“Yeah, Mexican TV dinners,” Melissa said.

“Remind me to strangle you later.” He half-trotted out of the house and got into the passenger side. Despite the extra load of hours he’d been forced into, Higgins appeared fresh and in good humor, which made Kurt feel even more negligent.

“You know, Mark, I’m really sorry about all these long shifts you have to work because of me. When my suspension ends, I’ll make it up to you.”

Higgins pulled back onto 154, checking the rearview as a formality. “Not necessary,” he said. “Been short on money this week anyway. The extra time and a half I’m getting for your hours is a godsend, if you want to know the truth.”

Kurt hoped he wasn’t just saying that to be a nice guy. “Where are we going, by the way?”

“Didn’t the chief call you?”

“Yeah, but I only got part of it.”

Higgins waited for some radio crackle to pass. “South County hasn’t been able to make positive ID on that body Glen found.”

“Body is a pretty lenient term,” Kurt said, fingering his top pocket for a cigarette.

“So I heard, but it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a bloater or a spatula special. Anyway, Bard wanted to call this Harley Fitzwater to find out the name of his dentist and the hospital his daughter went to when she broke her back, but there was no phone number listed on your 85 report.”

“That’s because Fitzwater doesn’t have a phone. He uses the pay phone at the liquor store. But then I thought I’d made that clear.”

Higgins cracked a smile. “Well, you know how the chief gets when things turn hairy. In one ear and out the other. He wants us to get the info from Fitzwater himself.”

“Fitzwater’s a hermit,” Kurt warned. “He lives like a Cajun. I wouldn’t be surprised if he never took his daughter to a dentist. Let’s not get our hopes up about a quick ID from dental records.”

“Sure, but he must’ve taken her to a hospital when she busted her spine. South County needs those X rays to match with the ones they made last night.” Higgins slowed through one of the road’s more unmanageable bends. “Bard said you know where this place is.”

“Just a little bit past the marsh.” Kurt strained his eyes looking for Fitzwater’s ravaged mailbox. “Here,” he said, and pointed. “Turn here.”

Higgins cut left. They crept down the ruined road, clunking over holes and branches. Fitzwater’s ramshackle trailer faced them sullenly, squalid in the pillared shadows of the woods.

Kurt lit a cigarette and let it hang from his lips, speechless. The trailer looked demolished; one side of it had come off the cinderblocks that formed its foundation, which caused the trailer to sit lopsided. Rain-sodden garments weighed the clothesline to the ground like scraps of raw meat. Amid bald tires and stray auto parts, several bizarre white piles of fluff dotted the front yard, and Kurt remembered the chickens he’d seen when writing up the initial report. The same cat he’d also seen disappeared behind the trailer, significantly more plump.

But that was not what the two men gaped at.

The front door of the trailer lay yards out to the left, as if thrown there. It had been torn off its hinges.

“What the fuck’s this?” Higgins asked.

“
Wahoos
,” was Kurt’s answer. “A bunch of
wahoos
having some fun with a man who never bothered anyone.”

“Fitzwater’s dirt poor—he’s got nothing of value. Why would burglars waste time sacking
his
place?”

“This is the worst county in the state for crime,” Kurt said. “Shitheads don’t need a reason to tear the shit out of things and kill people.” He took the Remington 870P out of the cruiser’s ready rack and pumped a round into the chamber. “Check the back. I’ll go inside.”

They fanned out, trotting across the yard. Higgins peeled off to the right around the trailer, his revolver tipped forward. Kurt approached more slowly, the shotgun muzzle pointing down, crossing his left knee. He clicked off the safety with his right index finger.

A puddle of flat rainwater shone dully beyond the torn-open doorway, suggesting that whoever did this had come and gone hours or even days ago. He suspected he’d find Fitzwater dead inside or somewhere nearby. Why else wouldn’t he have contacted the police?

Kurt stood a few yards back from the doorway, looking in at an angle. He held his breath and listened. His finger parallel against the trigger guard, he raised the gun barrel and stepped into the trailer.

He crossed the threshold in a swift, diagonal movement, making a complete circle, like a three-point turn, and after a quick visual sweep of the inside, he stood still again and listened. There was an odd, acrid smell that reminded him of the qualification range, but mixed with another far more nameless odor.

The trailer’s tiny windows and the dark day made it difficult to see. There’d be no lights; Fitzwater had no electricity. Kurt waited, shotgun poised, and as his eyes grew used to the poor light, he discerned that no one else was in the trailer, hostile or dead.

He opened the curtains—old towels tacked over the minuscule windows—careful not to touch any surface that would take a good print. Gray light streamed in and revealed a shambles. Long crescents of glass sparkled on the floor. Makeshift furniture lay in pieces, splintered like tinder. Overall, the interior of the trailer looked as though it had been
grenaded
.

He tiptoed through the wreckage, searched more closely. Two ragged concentric holes had been punched into the far left wall, and verified the tinge he knew must be gunpowder. He was not shocked to find the antique side-by-side on the floor by the baseboard. What shocked him, though, was the condition of the old shotgun—its long, twin barrels had been bent nearly in half.

Still, there was the smell. Not the combusted nitrates, but something else.

Then he noticed the great dark shape opposite the pocked wall, the position from which Fitzwater must’ve discharged the old double barrel. First he thought it must be a shadow, but then his own shadow darkened it as he stepped closer. It was a vast wash of blood.

The reality of what he saw hit him with the impact of a shout.
So much blood,
he thought.
So much.
The stain engulfed the entire corner walls, like deformed wings. The floor glistened, slippery with blood, as though it had been dumped there in buckets. Kurt convinced himself that Fitzwater had wounded several of his attackers—surely a single human being could not contain so much blood.

There was one last thing, the finishing mark of the rampage.

Kurt’s foot brushed something light as he moved back. He froze and looked down. Glared. Focused.

He thought it was an animal skin. Many of this county’s poor sold hides for extra cash. A possum hide, for example, brought about a dollar and a half from local tanners, and a
racoon
skin went for up to forty dollars, depending upon the season.

Higgins came into the trailer. “Nothing out back except—” but he stopped to look around in obtuse dismay. “Judas J. Priest.”

Kurt backed up, his guts crawling.

“I better call this in,” Higgins said. “I take it Fitzwater’s not here.”

“You be the judge.” Kurt pointed to the floor.

Higgins squatted before it. He examined the thing with a tiny
Tekna
micro-
lith
light he kept on his belt. He poked at it apprehensively. “Holy Mother—” he said, not looking at Kurt. “What is this thing?”

”A scalp,” Kurt replied. “I think it’s Fitzwater’s scalp.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Time had escaped him. He was aware only of the weapon.

Night fell on the sedate motel, the sun stealing away without Sanders ever realizing it. Inside, shadows expanded and eventually filled Room 6, save for the nebulous trapezoid of lamplight ablaze over the desk. He sat quite still, quite transfixed. Soft light touched his face, and he looked at the weapon.

Veneration, or perhaps an abstract kind of loyalty, made his eyes shine. Sanders trusted his relationship with guns. It was not a false one. There were many people today who regarded weapons erroneously. There were the gun shop commandos, the underground Nazis, and all these civilian jungle troopers who pursued an interest in guns because guns were cool, guns were power, guns were things of men. They wore camouflage jackets on the weekends, DEATH FROM ABOVE T-shirts, and caps and belt buckles embossed with names of their favorite gun companies; yet they knew nothing of the military, of killing, and of the reality of guns. These were the people on which the gun industry flourished, the very people who should not have guns. Never mind the right to bear arms—what good were guns when wielded by jackasses? Guns were the stilts of this lot, making little men tall. To them, guns were proof of masculinity, but they never saw the falseness of their ideals. They worshipped guns behind the sheer lack of faith in their own penises.

Sanders knew guns in an honest way, and he had business with them. There was still much he didn’t know about his potential enemy.

The weapon lay before him on the desktop. He appraised it in reverent silence. M16A1 Colt Firearms Mfg. Co., Hartford, Conn. How did the classic saying go?
Be a man large or small in size, Samuel Colt will equalize?
The weapon’s black anodized finish shone dully in the
lampglow
. It was long, lithe, light— the dominatrix of assault rifles. The simple look of it stifled him. He felt the puzzling beauty of this weapon, a structural beauty derived from functional ugliness.

He was pleased that he had not forgotten how to do the field strip; within a minute, he had reduced the rifle to a layout of parts, each of which he examined and found free of defects and dirt. He checked the
gasline
for dents, the select switch for play, the buffer spring, the bolt-carrier, and everything else within the 11 Bravo maintenance echelon. No pits, no stress marks. He raised the upper receiver to the light and peered down the barrel, glimpsing what idiom had dubbed the flower of death.

The weapon was immaculate and in close to mint condition, as Wilson had said. After lightly lubricating the bolt-runner with LSA-medium and wiping the parts down, Sanders reassembled everything.

In addition to three 30-round clips and four percussion grenades, Wilson had also supplied five 20-round boxes of 5.56mm tracer, bullets which traveled at a rate in excess of 3,000 feet per second. If they didn’t work, nothing would.

He pushed the many statistical question marks from his mind. He knew that before he made his move, he needed to familiarize himself with the target area, and maybe drop a few questions on some of the locals. It was almost nine o’clock.

He hid the weapon, the ammunition and grenades, and his vest in the box spring of his bed. Though he was sure no one had seen him bring it in, he didn’t like the idea of leaving such sensitive items here unguarded, but driving around with them in a stolen car wasn’t much in the way of brains, either. All he brought with him then was a compact
Almar
folding knife with a three-inch blade, which was about all that might conform to Maryland’s foggy,
uninterpretable
knife laws.