Bad Men (2003) (18 page)

Dexter came out of the room just as Bill stopped screaming.

“I’m glad you did that now, and not earlier,” he told Moloch. “You might have put me off my game.”

Bill was crying again. His face was pale with shock.

“You okay, Bill?” asked Moloch. He sounded genuinely concerned. “Nod if you’re okay, because when you’ve recovered, Willard can move on to the next finger. Unless, of course, you think you might have something more to tell us?”

Bill was trembling. He looked up and saw the clock on the mantel over Moloch’s left shoulder.

“Aw, shit,” he said. His eyes flicked toward the half-open bedroom door. He could see Jenna’s shadow moving against the wall as she tried to dress herself. Moloch watched him with amusement.

“You worried about her coming back, maybe finding out about your little piece on the side? Answer me, Bill. I want to hear your voice. It’s impolite to nod. You nod at me again, or make me wait longer than two seconds for an answer, and I’ll have Willard here break something you have only one of.”

“Yes,” croaked Bill. “I’m worried about her finding out.”

“A more self-aware man might have realized by now that he had bigger problems to face than his wife discovering his affair. You are a remarkable man, Bill, in your capacity to blind yourself to the obvious. Now, where is my family?”

“I told you, she hasn’t been in touch, not with me.”

“Ah, now we’re making progress. If she hasn’t been talking to you—and I’ve got to be honest here, Bill, I’d prefer not to be talking to you either, so I can understand her point of view—then she has been talking to her sister, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re such a piece of shit, Bill, that even your own wife won’t tell you where her sister is.”

“She doesn’t tell me anything.”

“But you must know how they communicate?”

“Phone, I guess.”

“Where are your phone records?”

“In the cabinet by the TV. There’s a file. But she never uses the house phone. I’ve looked.”

“Does she receive mail?”

“Yes.”

“Where does she keep it?”

“In a locked box in the bottom drawer of her nightstand.”

Moloch nodded at Willard, and the boy went into the bedroom to search for the box.

As he left the room, car headlights brightened the hallway, briefly illuminating their faces and casting fleeting shadows across the room. Leonie pressed the gun against Bill’s teeth, forcing him to open his mouth, then shoved the barrel inside.

“Suck it,” she whispered. “I see your lips move from it and I’ll pull the trigger.”

From the bedroom came the sound of sudden movement: Jenna was trying to make for the window to raise the alarm, Moloch guessed. Willard was too quick for her, and the movement ceased. Moloch heard the car door closing; footsteps on the path; the placing of the key in the lock; the door opening, then shutting again; the approach of the woman.

She stepped into the living room. She was older than he remembered her as being, but then it had been more than five years since they had last met. In the interim, Moloch had been betrayed and they had run, scattering themselves to the four winds, inventing new lives for themselves. Even with Moloch behind bars, they remained fearful of reprisals.

Patricia had long, lush hair like her younger sister’s, but there was more gray in it. She wasn’t as pretty, either, and had always looked kind of worn down, but that was probably a consequence of being married to an asshole like Bill. Moloch, who didn’t care much either way, still wondered why she had stayed with him. Maybe, after all the fear, she needed someone even semireliable to stand beside her.

Patricia took in her husband, huddled on the floor, the woman’s gun in his mouth; Dexter, his shirt still untucked; Braun, an open magazine on his lap.

And Moloch, smiling at her from an armchair.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “I’m home.”

All was quiet. Even Bill had stopped sobbing and now simply cradled his damaged hand as he watched his wife. She stood before Moloch, her head cast down. Her left cheek was red from the first slap, and her upper lip was split.

“Look at me,” he said.

She did not move and he struck her again. It was a light slap, but the humiliation of it was greater than if he had propelled her across the room with the force of the blow. She felt the tears roll down her cheeks and hated herself for showing weakness before him.

“I’ll let you live,” said Moloch. “If you help me, I’ll let you and Bill live. Someone will stay here with you, just to make sure you don’t do anything stupid, but you will be allowed to live. I won’t kill her. I just want my money. I don’t even want the boy. Do you understand?”

Her mouth turned down at the edges as she tried to keep herself from sobbing aloud. She found herself looking at her husband. She wanted him to stand by her, to be strong for her, stronger than he had ever been. She wanted him to defy Moloch, to defy the woman with the gun, to follow her even unto death. Yet he had never shown that strength before. He had always failed her, and she believed that even now, when she needed him most, he would fail her again.

Moloch knew that too. He was watching what passed between them, taking it in. There might be something there he could use, if only—

Willard came out of the bedroom. There was blood on his hands and shirt. A spray of red had drawn a line across his features, bisecting his face. Life was gradually seeping back into his eyes. He was like a man waking from a dream, a dream in which he had torn apart a woman whose name he had barely registered, and whose face he could no longer remember.

Bill screamed the name of the dead woman in the bedroom, and his wife knew at last that all she had suspected and feared was true.

“No, Bill,” was all that she said.

And something happened then. They looked at each other and there was a moment of deep understanding between them, this betrayed woman and her pathetic husband, whose weaknesses had led these men to their door.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for it all. Tell him nothing.”

Bill smiled, and although there was a touch of madness to it, it was, in its way, an extraordinary thing, like a bloom in a wasteland, and in the midst of her hurt and fear, she found it in her to smile back at him with more love and warmth than she thought she would ever again feel for him. Everything was about to be taken from them, or what little they had left, but for these final moments they would stand together at last.

She turned and stared Moloch in the eye.

“How could I live if I sold out my sister and my nephew to you?” she whispered.

Moloch’s shoulders sagged. “Dexter,” he said, “make her tell us what she knows.”

Dexter’s face brightened. He started to walk across the room, and for an instant, Leonie glanced at him. It was Bill’s opportunity, and he took it. He struck out with his uninjured hand and caught Leonie on the right cheekbone, close to the eye. She stumbled back and he reached for the gun, striking her again with his elbow. The gun came free.

Across the room, Braun was already reaching for his weapon. Willard still looked dazed, but was trying to remove his own gun from his belt. The gun in Bill’s hand panned across the room, making for Moloch. Moloch grabbed Patricia and pulled her in front of him, using her as a shield.

From the corner of his eye, Bill registered the guns in the hands of the two men, Willard frozen in place, Leonie rising to her knees, still swaying from the impact of the blows, the voices shouting at him.

He looked to his wife, and there came that smile again, and Bill loved her.

He fired the gun, and a red wound opened at his wife’s breast. For an instant, all was noise.

Then silence.

They said nothing. Bill lay dead against the wall. Shepherd and Tell were at the door, drawn by the commotion. Patricia Gaddis was still alive. Moloch leaned over her where she lay.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me.”

He touched his finger to the wound in her breast, and she jerked like a fish on a line.

“Tell me and I’ll make it stop.”

She spit blood at him and started to tremble. He gripped her shoulders as she began to die.

“I’ll find her,” he promised. “I’ll find them both.”

But she was already gone.

Moloch stood, walked over to Willard, and punched him hard in the face. Willard stumbled back and Moloch hit him again, driving him to his knees.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” said Moloch. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on anyone unless I give you permission to do so first. I will tell you what I want from you, and you will do it. From now on, you breathe because I allow you to breathe.”

Willard mumbled something.

“What did you say?”

Willard took his hands away from his ruined nose.

“I found it,” said Willard. “I found the box.”

The letters were postmarked Portland, Maine. Patricia should not have held on to them—her sister had warned her against it—but it was all that she had of her, and she treasured every word. Sometimes she would sit alone in the bedroom and try to catch a hint of her little sister, some trace of her perfume. Even when the scent of her had faded entirely, Patricia believed that she could still detect some faint remnant, for the memory of her sister would never leave her.

“It’s not a big city, but she still won’t be easy to find,” said Dexter. They were already leaving the scene, departing Camp Hill. Initially, Moloch wasn’t sure if the gunshots had been registered by the neighbors, for nobody was on a step or in a yard when they left the house, but minutes later they heard sirens. They had ditched the van that had been parked at the back of the house as a precaution, but the risk had been worth it.

“And she won’t be using her own name,” Dexter continued.

Moloch raised a hand to silence him.

She won’t be using her own name.

If she was using an alias, she would need identification, and she could not have assembled that material for herself. She must have approached someone, someone who she believed would not betray her. Moloch went through the names in his head, exploring all of the possibilities, until at last he came to the one he sought.

Meyer.

Karen Meyer.

She would have asked a woman.

They headed for Philly, where they took rooms at a pair of motels off the interstate. Dexter and Braun ate at a Denny’s, then brought back food for the others. Both Willard and Leonie had injuries that might have attracted attention, and Moloch could not risk having his face seen. Shepherd and Tell watched TV in their room. A reporter was talking about the rebuilding of Afghanistan.

“Man, we bombed those bastards back to the Stone Age,” said Tell.

From what Shepherd could see of their houses, these people weren’t far from the Stone Age to begin with. All things considered, it was a short but eventful trip for most of them. Still, Shepherd figured that they’d asked for it.

“Eye for an eye,” said Tell.

“It’s the way of the world,” Shepherd agreed.

As usual, Dexter and Braun shared a room. Braun read a book while Dexter watched a DVD on his portable player.

“What are you watching?” asked Braun.

“The Wild Bunch.”

“Uh-huh. What else you got?”

“
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
.
The Thing
.
The Shootist
.”

Braun put his book down for a moment.

“You always watch movies where the leading men are doomed to die at the end?”

Dexter looked over at Braun.

“They seemed…
appropriate
.”

Braun held his gaze.

“Yeah,” he said. “Whatever.”

He returned to his book. He was reading Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. Braun believed in knowing about the past, particularly the past as it pertained to the military, having been an army man himself at one point. The Athenians were about to send out their great fleet, loaded with archers, slingers, and cavalry, to take Sicily, against the advice of the more prudent voices among them. Braun didn’t know the intricacies of what was to occur, which was why he had taken up the book to begin with, but he remembered enough of his military history to know that the Athenian empire was sailing toward its ruin.

Moloch lay on the bed in his room and channel-surfed until he came to a news bulletin and saw the Land Cruiser being pulled from the river and the shrouded bodies being carried to the waiting ambulance. A picture of Misters appeared on the screen. He still had his eyes and his tongue when the photograph was taken. The cops were looking for eyewitnesses to the incident. They were also making casts of the tire tracks from the vans. It would not take them long to make the connection between the killings in Philadelphia and the escape. Moloch calculated that they had twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours to do what needed to be done before the net began to spread farther north.

It would be enough.

Strange now, or so it seemed, but Marianne had once liked his name. He called himself Edward; not Ted or Ed or Eddie. Edward. It had a kind of patrician ring to it. It was formal, no nonsense.

But she had never liked his second name and had not understood its provenance until it was too late. It was only when she learned more about his ways and began to pick away at his facade that she came to realize the nature of the man with whom she was involved. She had once read a newspaper article about a sculptress who worked with stone and who claimed that the piece she was creating was already present within the medium, so that her task was simply to remove the excess material that was obscuring what lay beneath. Later, Marianne would liken herself to that sculptress, gradually coming to see that what lay concealed under her husband’s exterior was something infinitely more complex and more frightening than she had ever imagined; and so it was that she began to fear his name when at last she commenced her search for clues about the man she had married and the secret things that he did.