Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (91 page)

I pushed my cup towards the center of the table and looked again out the window. A car drove by on what I presumed to be the main drag through town. Further down, buildings threaded the street. I saw a homely feed store and a cinema showing movies two months after they'd premiered in real cities. The sidewalks were narrow and empty. My eyes moved again to the Lewis Range. Were it not for those towering, icy pinnacles, this dead town would be unbearable.
  

# # #

At a quarter to noon, I pulled into a visitor’s parking space at the Choteau Police Department. Orson opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement, a manila envelope under his left arm.

We walked quickly along the sidewalk, strewn with dead leaves from two aspens on the building’s front lawn. Across the street, a dirt road climbed into a thicket of pines, blanketing a modest hill. We were as close to those snowy mountains now as we'd been all day, but the surrounding foothills blocked them from view. I couldn’t even see the downtown, only the narrow country road running beneath the blue sky and this police station, isolated from the minimal bustle of Choteau. It seemed out of place here among the foothills of the Lewis Range.

The police department was a meager, brick building. It was small, resembling a miniature version of a decrepit public school, only in place of yellow buses, there were police cars. We ascended the concrete steps, and Orson stopped me in front of the glass double doors.

"I’m the only one who talks in there," he said. Then he grabbed me suddenly and pulled me into him, crushing my chest in an awkward embrace. He opened the door and I followed him inside, walking straight through the lobby, littered with cheap furniture on brown carpet. The walls inside were a darker brick, and they gave the interior the musty feel of a wine cellar.

There was a desk at the end of the room and behind it, a hallway, perpendicular to the lobby. On the brick between the two corridors, Choteau Police Department, was spelled out in bold, brass letters. A secretary was talking on the phone when Orson walked up to the desk. He snatched the phone from her hands and hung it up.

"I need to speak to a detective," he said as she stared incredulously into his eyes.

Clearing her throat, she glanced warily behind her at the corridor. She was pretty, I thought, plain but pretty in her long, plaid dress. "What is it regarding?" she asked.

"Are you a detective?"

"No, I’m a…"

"Then quit asking me fucking questions. Get me a detective right now."

"Just a moment," she said. She picked up the phone and dialed an extension. "Roger, are you busy?…
 
Okay…
 
There’s a man here who wants to speak with you…
 
I don’t know…
 
He’s being rude…
 
I don’t know…
 
I’m fine." She hung up the phone. "He’ll be right with you," she said. "You can wait over there." She spun around quickly in her swivel chair and began typing at a computer. Orson stood by the desk, tapping impatiently on the wood.

Less than a minute had passed when a tall, thin man in a dark blue suit emerged from the corridor. He stopped behind the desk and nodded to Orson and me.

"You asked for a detective?" he said, and Orson nodded. "Come with me," he said, and we walked past the desk down the hallway on the right. The brick walls were drab and undecorated. I followed behind Orson, watching his feet pound softly against the thin, hard carpet.

"I’m Detective
Hartness
," the man said without turning around. "Why were you rude to Jennifer?" He glanced at Orson, fire in his bleak, white face. His brown hair hung just above his eyebrows, and his ears were large and grotesque, like an old man’s.

"It doesn’t really matter," Orson said. "You’re about to become famous."

If
Hartness
heard him, he didn’t show it. He kept walking, into a large, bright room full of desks and computers, where several men typed furiously, filling the room with a nervous, staccato pattering like raindrops hitting a hot microphone. We proceeded through the dark corridor on the other side of the workroom, and I could see the end now. There were three vending machines for coffee, soft drinks, and snacks lined up against the brick at the terminus of the corridor. But we stopped long before the end when
Hartness
turned suddenly and opened a plain, black door on the left wall. He held it open for us while we filed inside.

A boring little room with bare brick walls, a table stood in the center with four chairs slid underneath it. I thought it strange that a single, unshielded light bulb burned brightly overhead. We pulled out the chairs and sat down, Orson and me on one side, facing
Hartness
. The detective was removing his jacket when Orson broke the tense silence.

"Get a tape recorder," he said. "I’m only doing this once."

Hartness
hung his jacket on the back of a chair and began unbuttoning his cuffs. He was already sweating as he rolled up his shirt sleeves. "We’ll get to that," he said. “Why don’t…"

"Get the tape recorder or I say nothing," Orson said, rage buried in his voice.

Hartness
sighed and slid back in his chair. He got up and left the room.

"Orson…"

"Not a word, Andy."

We sat in silence, and I drummed on the table until Orson glared at me. I wondered if there was really a dead police officer in the trunk of our car. After two minutes, the detective returned carrying a large tape recorder under his arm. He set it down on the table and plugged the long, black cord into a socket in the wall. Sitting down, he lit a cigarette and pressed a red button.

"Your name?"
Hartness
asked.

"Orson Thomas."

"Well, Mr. Thomas, what do you wanna tell me?"

Orson had been leaning forward with his elbows on the table. Now he leaned back and removed his blood-stained fleece jacket. He threw it into a corner and smiled at the detective. Then he tossed the manila envelope onto the table.

"Have a look," Orson said, his voice cold and emotionless.

The detective lifted the envelope and tore it open. Withdrawing a quarter-inch stack of photographs and newspaper clippings, he gazed down at the photographs, and his skeptical face turned immediately into shock. He laid a picture on the table and stared down at it, taking a long draw from his cigarette.

I managed to see the picture upside down--a five by seven, color photo of a woman lying naked on the ground, a gaping hole in her chest and a bloody mass in the palm of her hand. It could’ve been Shirley. It could’ve been any of them.

Hartness
spread a dozen similar photographs across the table, and I could see him fighting to retain composure. He blinked more than usual and swallowed hard several times. I watched Orson watching the detective. There was a sick gleam in my brother’s eyes, as if he'd waited for this moment his entire life. The detective looked back up at Orson when he'd finished thumbing through the newspaper clippings.

"So,"
Hartness
said. "What do you want me to do with this?"

"Are you a complete fucking idiot?"

Hartness
said nothing. He just stared at my brother.

"You watch the news?" Orson asked, his voice more courteous.

"Yeah."

"And you don’t know who I am? Washington D.C. Thirty-seven boxes. Ring a bell?"

"Look, I know what a crank is. I know when I’m being lied to. The FBI sent out a memo to every police station in the country. They receive around 90 cranks a day relating to the Heart Surgeon case. We’ve had one over the phone already this week."

"That’s funny," Orson said, livid. "I had a feeling you wouldn’t take me seriously."

"Good instinct,"
Hartness
said, rising to his feet. "You just committed a felony, and I’m gonna arrest…"

"Barry Johnson’s in the trunk of my car you prick."

The detective placed his hands on the table and leaned towards Orson. "I don’t think you wanna take the credit for kidnapping that police officer,"
Hartness
said with a smug grin.

Orson reached into his jeans' pocket and tossed a shiny badge and a driver’s license onto the table. "I killed him, too."

The cocky, wise-ass smile vanished from the detective’s face. He looked down at the badge which rested face-up on the colorful photographs. Lifting the driver’s license, he stared at it a moment, then looked back down at the pictures. The burning cigarette fell from his lips, and he drew his gun. He pointed it at Orson, but my brother only laughed, nodding in approval.

"Stay right there,"
Hartness
said, his voice low, filled with malice, his hands shaking. He edged to the door and opened it.

"Want the car keys?" Orson asked. "So you can get that smelly body out of my trunk. I waive my rights."

"Take them out slowly,"
Hartness
said, and I reached carefully into my pocket and withdrew the keys. I tossed them to the detective and he caught them in his left hand as he pointed his 9mm at Orson. Then he slammed the door and locked it.

# # #

The detective had been gone two minutes when Orson straightened himself in his chair and turned towards me. He put his face into his hands and ran his fingers through his greasy hair.

"Andy," he said, lifting his head, his eyes alive again, a smile edging across his lips. "Now I've gotta let you in on something."

My head ripped apart. Involuntarily, my eyes closed and when I opened them again, I was walking towards a woman, chained to the pole in the desert shed. I held a hunting knife in my hand, blinked, and was on her. Her screams were strangely pleasing, like I'd acquired the taste of a long-despised food. I stared down at her face as she exhaled her last bloody breath. It contorted into another, and this face breathed its last, gurgling breath, too, replaced by another, and over and over again I watched the men and women die.

I stood on the desert in the dead of night. All around me, there were open holes in the sand. I walked beside each one, and peering down inside, saw the heartless bodies, their eyes open, staring at me with a hollow rage, though they were not alive. The horrible scream rang out, inhuman, eternal. It was always there, in the back of my mind, as loud as I'd let it be.

Like movie frames passing in slow motion, a surge of images engulfed me. Standing at a podium and lecturing to fifty students. Running through a city street at night towards a railroad car. Fire in a rusted oil drum. Pounding rock into skull. Driving a black prostitute out of south Charlotte towards my lake house. Burying her in my backyard. Waiting on the shoulder of a dark highway for someone to pull over and help me with my car. Leaving boxes in Washington before dawn. Strangling my crying mother in her bed, her wide, confused eyes as the pantyhose tightens. Walter begging for his life and screaming why in the cold woods. Dragging a police officer from his car across the road. Shoving him bleeding into the trunk. Writing letters to a man named Andrew Thomas, who had no idea what he'd done or what he was.

I opened my eyes. My heart pounded, but the screaming had stopped. In the interrogation room, the tape recorder still running, the light bulb burning quietly above my head, I sat alone.

# # #

I leaned against the cool, metal fence and stared across the prairie. It was late in the day, nearly six o'clock, and though it was early August, the sky remained flawlessly blue. I liked standing here looking through the fence, because I could've been in my own backyard, in my own clothes, deciding which restaurant I'd dine in tonight. I could almost forget the four guard-towers, the high-powered rifles, and the icy men who held them.

Sick of the prairie now, I’d memorized the contours of the land, how it gracefully descended for six, gentle miles into a valley of pines, and how those pines adorned the lower slopes of the sharp, brown mountains. From the prison yard, I could see the skylines of the three ranges that surrounded Montana State Prison--the Big Belt Mountains to the east, the snowier Swan Range in the north, and the jagged, wild-looking Bitter Roots, west and south.

Normally, on a summer evening, I’d take my hour of exercise around eight o’clock. I liked to come out late to see the sunset, though the guards would never let me stay for its entirety. Prisoners aren’t allowed out after dark, but it was worth it just to see the sky turn red and purple for a short time. It made me feel normal again to know that at that moment, when the sun had almost slipped away, everyone watching it fade felt the same sense of loss as me.