The Killing Vision (5 page)

He walked past the house and down to the barn. 
Inside, he stripped the cover off the Mustang and looked at it.  Ran his hands
over the hood.  He’d wanted one of these for so long, he could hardly believe
he now owned one.  A muscle car—that’s what it was, plain and simple.  Like a
body builder without one ounce of fat on him.  Pure power.

Marla had sure bitched when he bought the thing. 
God, how she had bitched.  But one pop to the mouth had shut her up.

His plan was to get the Mustang restored in time for
Derek’s high school graduation.  It sure would be a hell of a present.  He
could picture it parked out behind the house, all freshly-waxed and shimmering,
with a big bow tied around it, and the look in Derek’s eyes when Wade dropped
the keys in his hand, knowing how hard they had all worked on it together. 

Maybe it would help the kid grow up, help him become
more of a man.  He sure as shit hoped so.  His greatest fear was that Derek
would grow up to be a faggot.  That was just something he would not be able to
live with.  Hell, the kid was sixteen and still hadn’t ever had a girlfriend. 
Derek was a big kid.  And good looking, too.  He should have been surrounded by
girls.

Wade sure as hell didn’t want Derek to turn out like
Joel.  Now there was a pathetic bastard.  Twenty-nine years old, still living
by himself, mooning over girls he couldn’t have, eating himself into an early
grave.  A freewheeling bachelor, able to play the field with as many women as
he wanted, yet living alone without even a fucking dog to keep him company. 
The poor ugly son-of-a-bitch had never had much luck with women, though, even
in high school when he played football.  But now that he was older and fatter
and losing his hair, well…  Wade knew he probably couldn’t get laid unless he
paid for it.

Wade had never had a problem getting women, even as
a zit-faced teenager.  They just seemed to naturally flock to him.  He knew he
had the charm to make them feel special, to make them feel
wanted. 
Hell,
all he had to do was start talking to a woman and she practically melted all
over the floor.  Just a rare talent, he had decided.

Derek had been born when Wade was seventeen and
Marla was sixteen.  They were hurriedly married at Shy Flat Church, and then
they moved into a mouse-infested trailer in the back yard of Marla’s parents’
house.  Derek was born six months later.  Wade had settled down for a little
while and tried to be content with just one woman.  That didn’t last long. 
Before their first anniversary he was already restless and bored, and before
their second he had already slept with three other women.  It wasn’t that he
didn’t love Marla.  He truly did back then.  But there were times when what she
could give him just wasn’t enough, or didn’t excite him, or couldn’t satisfy
him.  He needed variety, and Marla just wasn’t capable of providing it.  And
over the past few years Marla didn’t seem capable of providing
anything
. 
They never kissed, barely touched.  Sex seemed to disgust her, and now he found
fulfillment exclusively outside.

This job with the cable company provided him with
ample opportunities to meet women, like some of those college babes lounging
around fingering each other in the dorm or bored housewives whose husbands were
at work and they were home alone just waiting for the cable guy to come install
HBO.  Joel was usually with him on installs, but occasionally he had the good
fortune to be alone, and more than once he had been shown the kind of gratitude
customers didn’t normally give their cable-TV installers.  Most times he simply
flirted, got a girl’s phone number, promised to call her, that kind of thing.

Like yesterday.  Joel was doing some maintenance at
the office and Wade was doing an upgrade by himself at one of the apartment
houses in town.  He had gone around in back of the building to check the
service entrance, back beside the pool.  There was a girl stretched out on one
of the metal chaise lounges beside the blue water, spread out during one of the
few intense breaks in the threatening clouds.  He had immediately begun to
sweat.  The fluorescent orange of her bikini was a sharp contrast to her
sun-bronzed skin and long dark hair, and the mounds of her breasts splayed out
from beneath the edges of her top, her nipples pressing against the material
like pointing fingers.  She was wearing sunglasses, so it was impossible to see
her eyes, but he smiled at her anyway, and when she smiled back, he knew she
was watching him as closely as he was watching her. 

When he had finished his work, he made his way over
to her, leaning against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the pool area. 
“Hot day,” he said.  “Gonna storm later.”

She rolled over and smiled at him.  “I love the
heat,” she said.

Wade was looking at her breasts, at the minute
droplets of perspiration that trickled between them.  He licked his lips. 
“Guess it’s not so bad if you got a pool,” he said.  He placed his hands on the
top of the railing, knowing she would look at his left one, looking for a
wedding band that wouldn’t be there because he never wore one.

“I’m Missy,” she said.

“Wade Roberts.”

“Maybe you could come over and swim sometime.  It’s
okay if you’re a guest of a tenant.”

He nodded, feeling the bulge of his erection press
against the hot metal.  “I’d like that.”  He looked around, hoping no one could
see him practically humping the fence.  “This what you do all day?  Hang out by
the pool?”

She laughed.  “Not every day.  I’m on vacation this
week.”

“Oh.”  He was making small talk, using any excuse he
could to stand there looking at her glistening skin and the nipples poking
against her bikini top.  “I had you pegged for a student.  Where you work?”

“I work for Dr. Seaver, the pediatrician.  You know
him?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Don’t have to ask what you do.”

He grinned at her, using that full-toothed smile
that always got a woman’s juices flowing.  “Hey, can I get your phone number?” 
He pulled a memo pad and a pencil from his shirt pocket and held them out to
her.  She took them and scribbled on the paper.  
555-8344 Missy. 
“Great,”
he said, tearing off the sheet and folding it into the pocket of his pants. 
“I’ll give you a call.  Take you up on that pool offer.”

“Sounds good,” she said.

By the time he returned to the truck, his zipper was
just about bursting open.  He drove to a secluded spot in town and took care of
himself.  It was quick.  There might be a no-smoking rule for the company
truck, but nothing said he couldn’t jack off in it.

And as he thought about it now, about the orange
swimsuit that barely concealed Missy’s golden curves, he felt himself grow
stiff again.  Ignoring it, he pulled the tarp back over the Mustang and closed
up the barn.

He was just crossing the yard toward the house when
Derek came flying up the driveway and roared to a halt on his four-wheeler. 
“You better slow down,” Wade told him.  “You’ll end up in orbit.”

Derek grinned at him and hopped off the Yamaha,
running a shirtsleeve across his sweaty forehead.  “Ready for dinner,” he said.

“Where you been?”

Derek shrugged.  “Just toolin’ around.  Went through
the woods into town, went by Chad’s house to see if he was home.”

“Was he?”  Chad was Derek’s best friend—just about
his
only
friend, so far as Wade knew.  They hung out together sometimes,
went camping out in the woods behind the barn, fishing down at the creek—all
the shit boys usually do.

“Nope.  His mom said he’d gone off with his dad
somewhere.”

Wade grunted as they stepped up on the porch and he
opened the back door.  “You be careful riding that thing in town.  It’s
illegal, you know.”

“I didn’t get on the streets,” Derek said.  “I went
the back way, up through the woods, then through the park right up to his back
door.”

“Still,” said Wade, “I don’t want to have to come
bail you out of jail.”

“You think Chad could help us with the Mustang?”
Derek asked.

“I don’t know,” Wade told him.  “I was hopin’ just
you and me would work on it.  Maybe Joel.”

Derek nodded and slipped into the kitchen.  “That’s
cool.”

Inside, Marla stood at the stove, frying hamburger
patties in an iron skillet.  Derek peeked at them, then bounded off toward the
living room.

Wade looked at her.  “Hey,” he said.

She turned toward him and gave him an empty gaze,
then turned back to the skillet.  “Hey.”

Saturday, July 7

5:24 AM

Halloran came slowly awake in the early gray light,
coming out of a dream in which Sarah Jo McElvoy’s mother was chasing him
through the darkness of an inner-city alley.  She was screaming at him. 
“You
bastard!  Look what you did to my daughter!  My beautiful daughter!” 
He
turned and saw that she was wielding an ax, and he knew she intended to kill
him with it.  He had just reached the dead end of the alley and had turned to
brace himself for the blow when he discovered that Mrs. McElvoy had turned into
Sarah Jo.  Not the smiling, fresh-faced Sarah Jo from the photographs, but the
rotted, blackened corpse from the morgue.  She shuffled toward him, like
something from a bad horror movie, her hair slimy and dripping, her eyes white
and glazed, her skin a yellowish green.  She was wearing the purple shirt with
the cat on it, and the rest of her body was bare.  “See me?” she said in a
voice that sounded like dry leaves crunching together.  “See me?”

At that point he became aware of the weight of the
covers on his chest, and the purring cat by his face.  He opened his eyes
toward the blank ceiling.  Mel meowed softly, then stretched.  Halloran glanced
over at him.  “Hello, you stupid cat.”

He yawned and lay there silently, remembering the
dream, listening to the voice still echoing through his head. 
See me?
 
He shivered, pulling the sheet up to his neck.  Where the hell had
that
come from?  He closed his eyes trying to summon back his sleep, but beside him,
Mel had decided it was bath time and was noisily licking and purring.

Halloran pulled himself out of bed, pulled a pair of
boxers out of the bureau drawer and padded nude across the hall to the
bathroom.  He took a long, loud piss, watching himself in the mirror as he did
so, noticing how his stomach, once lean and flat, had begun to pooch over the
last couple of years.  It was what his late dad had referred to as “Dicky-do
Disease,” because, he said, “My belly hangs out farther than my dicky do.” 

He pulled on his boxers and headed toward the front
door.  He slid the chain from the slot and reached out into the hallway for his
morning paper, then made his way through the dark living room toward the
kitchen.  While his coffee brewed, he unfolded the paper on the table and blew
out a breath, staring down at the top story:

STILL NO
SUSPECTS IN GIRL’S MURDER

Officials said Friday there are
still no leads in the murder of 14-year-old Sarah Jo McElvoy of Cedar Hill.

Police Chief Norman Pettus said
the investigation is proceeding “as well as can be expected,” although there
are currently no suspects and no apparent motive.  The young girl’s body was
pulled from Cedar Hill’s Riverside Landing on Red River July 4.

Pettus declined to comment on
whether McElvoy had been sexually assaulted, but sources close to the Cedar
Hill police department said the girl had been violated by a blunt wooden
object.

Halloran pounded his fist on the table.  “Shit.”  He
had tried hard to keep that fact out of the paper, but someone in the police
department was always willing to talk, especially when gory details were
involved.  At least there was no mention of the body being frozen.  He could
only imagine what kind of alarm that would set off in the community. 

He folded up the paper and tossed it aside, then
poured himself a cup of coffee.  He stood at the counter, sipping it, then set
his cup down.  His briefcase was in the corner by the refrigerator.  He reached
for it, then plopped it down on the table and pulled out the file on Sarah Jo
McElvoy.

In the back of the folder, tucked inside a large
manila envelope, were the crime-scene photos from Wednesday night.  He pulled
them out and spread them over the table.

There really wasn’t much to see.  The girl’s body
was half on the dirt shore, half in the river, surrounded by piles of rotting
tree limbs that had apparently been used to hide her.  Close-ups of the body
revealed the putrefying skin bloated over the bones, hellish and gruesome.  The
dirt of the riverbank was covered in shoe prints; probably dozens of people had
been along the landing that day, and who knew how many since the body had been
placed there, and the freshest prints were those of the Davis boy and his
girlfriend.  How many times had that very place been searched since April?  At
least three times that he knew of.  When had someone taken the body down there
and concealed it under a pile of rotting limbs?  And why?  And who?