Bad Men (2003) (22 page)

Braun, weary now of Willard’s unsmiling company, had joined Dexter and Moloch in the lead van, while Leonie had taken the wheel of the second. Farther back along the road, Tell and Powell were engaged in a lengthy discussion of their various sexual conquests, both real and imagined, while Shepherd sat in silent judgment upon them. As the trip had worn on, Shepherd had begun to draw away a little not only from the younger men in the car but from the group as a whole. There had been no opportunity for him to talk with Dexter and Braun since Moloch’s escape, and the need to do so was now pressing. They knew one another well, these three men, for they had worked together before under Moloch’s aegis. Leonie too shared a history with Dexter, although she largely kept her own counsel, choosing to reveal her thoughts only with Dexter and trusting him to relay them, if necessary, to the rest of the group.

Shepherd was concerned about recent developments, including the killing of the investigator down at Dismal Creek and the mutilation of his companion, and the deaths of Moloch’s sister-in-law and her husband. He also had real worries about the sanity of at least one of their group.

Of Powell he knew little and, in truth, cared to know even less. He had come highly recommended, and had state time behind him in Maryland and Tennessee. Shepherd found him boorish and ignorant, and the snatches of conversation that were coming from Shepherd’s right did nothing to alter that perception. Tell, he liked, but while he understood the possible justification for taking the life of the young pizza-delivery man (he was smart, argued Tell after the fact, and might have noticed more than he pretended), he was not convinced that it was necessary, and Tell’s inability to make that distinction troubled him. The incident with the cell phone also indicated that Tell’s temper was somewhere between short and nonexistent. Shepherd, as previously noted, wasn’t a big fan of cell phones. He believed they were contributing to the creation of a ruder, less caring society. There was a time, and it wasn’t so very long ago, when people kept their voices down in public, not only because they wished to enjoy a little privacy in their conversations but also because talking too loudly disturbed the people around them. Now, all that was going out the window, along with leaving your car unlocked or your front door open. The fact that people now locked their doors and secured their houses to protect them from criminals like Shepherd was beside the point. Still, Shepherd had never really considered solving the cell phone problem by killing anyone who used one in a discourteous manner. It was a pity that nobody would ever know that excessive conversational volume was the reason behind the Arab’s murder. Otherwise, he might have made a nice example to others, convincing them to change their ways. Shepherd figured that Tell would be okay if he could just calm down some, maybe take a deep breath once in a while instead of pulling a trigger. Shepherd would work on him.

But the principal source of Shepherd’s unease was Willard, and he knew that Dexter shared that disquiet. Shepherd was a man who believed himself to be in control of his own appetites. He also knew, from past experience, that discipline and restraint in any operation increased the odds of its success, and that once those qualities began to dissipate, a breakdown of some kind inevitably followed. Willard, quite clearly, was incapable of exercising self-control, making Tell look like a Buddhist by comparison. He was an immature man defined by his appetites. Shepherd did not know what ties bound Willard to Moloch, or what made the older man show such indulgence toward the younger. Sometimes, Moloch seemed to demonstrate toward Willard the tenderness of a lover. At other times, he appeared almost paternal, protecting the younger man while reluctantly disciplining him. Whatever Moloch’s feelings about him, Willard was becoming more and more unpredictable. As a consequence, they were leaving a trail for others to follow, and there would be a reckoning because of it. Shepherd had no intention of sitting on death row, waiting to see if the chair or natural causes would take him first. His share of the money would buy him a comfortable life, if he was careful, and he had every intention of living long enough to spend it. He needed to talk with Dexter and Braun, for something had to be done about Willard.

If Leonie felt unease at the prospect of spending time in Willard’s company, she did not show it when Braun asked her to switch vehicles. Braun, for one, suspected that Leonie felt little of anything at all, and that under the skin she and Willard might well be blood relatives. Dexter had used her for jobs a couple of times, with Moloch’s agreement, but Braun still knew nothing about her other than a story Dexter had once told him. Leonie was heading out of some dyke bar in South Carolina—Braun was less surprised to hear that Leonie ate at home than that she’d managed to find a pickup joint in South Carolina—when a pair of guys jumped her in the parking lot. Braun knew their kind, had grown up alongside them: they hated women, particularly independent women, and there was nothing more independent than a woman who didn’t need a man for sex. They bundled her into the trunk of their car and drove her to a shack out in the woods. Braun didn’t need to know anything more about what had happened to Leonie after that, and Dexter didn’t tell him much anyway, but he could guess. Afterward, when they saw that she hadn’t buckled, they beat on her some, then dumped her out in back of the dyke bar, her clothes torn and bloody. She didn’t go back inside, though. Instead, she walked to her car, where her gun lay taped beneath the dashboard—she hadn’t bothered to carry it into the bar, a mistake that she would never again repeat—and returned to her apartment, where she washed and douched and treated her cuts, then took a couple of sleeping pills and went to bed.

The next morning, she called Dexter. She told him all that had occurred, and he drove down to be with her. It was Dexter who pulled the two guys from the street and brought them back to the shack, where Leonie was waiting. Then he sat outside in his truck, smoking and listening to R. L. Burnside while he watched the road. He heard that hunters found the two men a couple of days later. One of them was still alive, although he died as soon as the medics tried to move him. Dexter figured that Leonie would be kind of unhappy to hear that only one of them had survived for so long. Usually, she was precise about these things, but then she’d been pretty upset by what had been done to her, so it might have clouded her judgment some.

It wasn’t that part of the story that had stuck with Braun, though. The guys had gotten what they deserved, make no mistake about that, and Braun wasn’t about to shed any tears for them. No, what gave Braun an insight into Leonie was what those guys saw before they died. One had been married, while the other was dating a woman who worked nights providing technical support for her local ISP. Leonie had visited them both while she was waiting for Dexter to pick up the two men, and just as they’d had fun with her, well, she’d had fun with their women. She’d even taken some pictures before she left.

Dexter said they’d come out pretty good, considering the amount of red in them.

No, Willard wouldn’t be screwing with Leonie, not if he had any sense in that pretty-boy head of his.

Tell and Shepherd, meanwhile, appeared to have bonded. Shepherd had told Braun that he was reasonably impressed with how Tell had handled the Verso thing. Like Shepherd, Braun wasn’t so sure that Tell had really needed to kill the pizza guy, but there was no way of knowing how much he had taken in, so Tell had probably erred on the side of caution.

Whatever occurred, at least there was Dexter. Braun had known Dexter longer than almost any other human being. They were like brothers bound by blood. They shared cars, rooms, even women, although if Braun ever met a woman that he liked as much as Dexter, then he planned to marry her and not share her with anyone, not even Dexter.

This did not strike Braun as at all odd.

“You ever wonder about names?” asked Dexter, from out of nowhere.

“Wonder how?” said Braun.

“About how only some colors become names, and not others.”

“Like?”

“Like black. You know, Mr. Black. Or Mr. White. You got Mr. Green too, and your Mr. Brown, but that’s about it. You ever meet anybody called Blue, or Yellow, or Red? Doesn’t happen, except in movies. You think that’s strange?”

“You know, it never struck me before.”

“You think it’s interesting?”

“No. You got too much time on your hands, is what I think. You need to be doing something useful to keep your mind off shit like that. Just drive.”

“There was a time,” said Dexter, “when you thought I had a lot of interesting shit to say.”

“I thought you were deep. Then I got to know you.”

“You saying I’m not deep?”

“If you were a pool, little kids could paddle in you.”

“If you were a pool, little kids would piss in you.”

“Just drive, will you? The sooner we get to where we’re going, the sooner I can get away from your shallow black ass.”

But both men were smiling as Dexter tapped the gas, Moloch momentarily forgotten in the darkness behind them.

Shoot the women first: it was an axiom of antiterrorist units, quite literally a maxim to live by. The women were more fanatical. They had more to prove, and when they made a decision, they were less likely than their male peers to experience doubts or second thoughts about it. Women attempted suicide less frequently than men, but they were far more likely to follow the attempt through to its fatal conclusion. Similarly, when a woman picked up a gun and put her finger on the trigger, there was a good chance that someone’s body was about to be endowed with an extra hole.

If Willard was the most unpredictable of the little band of killers slowly making its way north, and Tell the most volatile, then Leonie was the most lethal. Braun was right to suspect as much, and Moloch, had he been asked, would have confirmed that his faith in her resolve was based entirely on the evidence of his own eyes. Leonie enjoyed power. Specifically, she enjoyed wielding the power of life and death, and had always done so. As a child, spiders and insects had briefly provoked her interest. They were simple to catch, and had enough easily detachable limbs to keep her amused in the clean little bedroom of the clean little unit that she shared with her mother in one of Philadelphia’s more desirable low-income housing projects. The young Leonie quickly tired of bugs, though, for there was no challenge to them. Similarly, unlike some of the boys who shared her environment, she did not enjoy tormenting cats and dogs. Instead, Leonie retreated into her own world, growing slowly quieter, a stillness creeping over her as she sat at her window and waited for the time when fantasy and reality might coalesce.

It was from that window that she watched as the slim black boy walked across the basketball court toward the one who called himself Ex. Ex had touched her once, while she was coming back from the store with an armful of groceries. She had been unable to move, fearful that she might drop the bag in her arms. It was the middle of the month, when money was always short for her momma, and so she had endured Ex’s touch, and the sour taste of his breath when he placed his mouth upon her own. Ex had grown bored when she did not respond, and called her some names that she did not understand. Secretly, her stillness had disturbed the young dealer, who found it unnerving the way her eyes had never left his, not even blinking while he fondled her. Since then, he had not approached her again, even as she matured into the fine-looking woman she would eventually become.

Now the boy was facing Ex, and Ex was saying something to him. Leonie felt her mouth grow dry. She pressed her fingers and face against the glass, a smear of breath pulsing, then fading, upon it.

She knew what the boy was about to do. She felt it from him, could see it in his stance.

Kill him, she thought. Kill him now.

And he did.

By the time Ex’s body hit the ground, the girl was running to the door of her apartment. She intercepted the boy on a patch of waste ground that led to the river. Already, she could hear sirens. The boy could hear them too. He looked scared.

“Give me the gun,” said Leonie.

The boy didn’t move. Instead, he just stared at the pretty girl with the thick black hair who stood before him. She was a year or two younger than he was, he guessed, but everything about her spoke of a maturity beyond his own.

“Give it to me,” she repeated. “They won’t search me.”

To their right, a patrol car made an arc into the project, spraying dirt and water from the rutted concrete. A second car came in from the left, effectively cutting off his exit. He couldn’t understand how they’d gotten there so fast.

Suddenly, the girl moved toward him, her hands slipping beneath his jacket as she hugged herself to him. She buried her face in his chest, then pulled back and kissed him on the cheek.

“Gotta run,” she said. “I’ll see you later, baby.”

And as the cops approached she skipped away across the dirt, the gun tucked into the waistband of her skirt, her shirt hiding the butt. He watched one of the cops glance at her, and saw her reward him with a little smile.

Then she was gone, and Dexter never saw the gun again.

But he saw the girl, and although that kiss was the only one she would ever give him, Dexter loved her, and he knew that she loved him too, in her way.

Still, he had never crossed her, and he never would. If it came down to it, he believed that she would kill him. She loved him more than she loved anyone else in the world, yet she would take his life if he failed her.

Dexter figured that, where Leonie was concerned, the rest of humanity didn’t stand a chance.

It was the absence of lights that alerted Karen Meyer. She heard the van pulling up outside her house, but no headlights matched its progress. Her first thought was that it was the cops coming, and she ran through a mental checklist as she climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans over her panties. The dummy passports and driving licenses were hidden in a panel behind her gas stove, accessible only by taking apart the oven from the inside, and she deliberately kept it thick with grease and food waste to discourage any possible search, even if it meant that the oven was rendered practically unusable as a result. Her inks, pens, and dyes were all in her studio, and were indistinguishable from the materials she used in her regular design work. Her cameras were an expensive Nikon, a cheaper Minolta, and a Canon digital. Again, she could argue that these were an essential part of her job, since she often had to take photos as part of her initial preparations. The last batch of material had gone out a few days before, and there was nothing on the slate. She figured that she was clean.