Chaingang (21 page)

It was typically company-oriented and task-oriented, aimed not so much at determining what happened to the missing persons, but whether or not their absence was going to have an ill effect on the Ecoworld project. The summary was as Fisher had stated: It appeared that a serial murderer was killing and/or abducting random persons from the Waterton/Maysburg area. While the report did not have the data on Rusty Ellis, or the conclusions on the fire at Butchie's, it did contain the “Smith-Truett-Kelly-Doe” murders from Maysburg's police department, which indeed seemed to confirm the existence of a brutal serial murderer on the loose.

For the first time, Royce was not so certain about the land deal having been the focal point that linked the missing persons, Sam in particular. Inarguably, there was a serial killer who was taking lives at random.

“What did you think?” Mary had asked him as soon as they were in the vehicle and homeward bound, Royce behind the wheel, his mind going a mile a minute. He was trying to sort out two parallel worlds, make that three, at once.

“You mean Fisher?"

“Mm."

“Seems like a decent guy. Nice guy.” His voice saying something else altogether.

“Something's going on here, right?” Mary was no rocket scientist, but she'd always been proud of her ability to size things up. After all, this was the woman who'd loaned a former junkie lover five thousand dollars. What do the banks call it—unsecured? She trusted her BS detector—always had.

“Yeah."

“Well?"

“I don't know."

“Come on, Royce. Talk to me."

“I don't know, babe. What can I say? It looks bad. It's going to get a lot worse. And it probably is a helluva lot worse than that, but nobody's telling us. There. That pretty well do it?” She just looked at him. “Sorry,” he sighed, letting out air. “I—"

“But ... do you think...” she really didn't want to articulate it “Sam is..."

“Yeah."

“The idea of a serial killer in Waterton—it's ridiculous. Unthinkable. But why wouldn't we have found Sam if that was it?” The concept of a serial murder case in a town of less than seven hundred people, a town so rinky-dink, it grows 50 percent larger when the migrant workers come through, was absurd!

“Let's just talk about the things we know, Mary. We've got enough to try to sort out without running through hypothetical situations. Sam is missing. He's not dead. We're not sure. Let's remember that.” Funny. Him telling her this. As if she didn't know.

“Yeah. But you think he's dead too, don't you? Be honest."

“Yes. I do,” he said quietly, after a few seconds. It seemed noisy in the silence of the car. “I have nothing more to base it on than the others being missing. But I think he's gone.” He reached over and patted her arm. She felt stiff.

“Yes,” was all she said. Yes. That's what I think. That's what I feel. Yes was enough.

“As far as the Ecoworld deal having anything to do with it. I don't know. Five minutes ago I thought it might. At this second I don't believe that it does. Five minutes from now I may change my mind again. We don't have real facts. We're working from suppositions based on what others are telling us. And we know the legendary Marty Kerns isn't giving us anything. This CCC deal still looks fishy as hell to me, I don't care if there is a serial murderer out there somewhere."

“This thing says that World Ecosphere surveyed ‘small towns throughout the middle-American states, from the northern heartland to the South, in search of the perfect community for development.’ Jeezus! Royce—I just thought. Sam was supposed to make all this money by buying up surrounding land and what they called ‘access properties.’ This was supposed to be one of the perks for setting up the deal, see? He'd be in the know and all, and nobody else would know about it, so he could buy land at reasonable prices. Then when the Ecoworld park was promoted nationally, the ‘nothing ground’ he'd been buying up would have become choice real estate."

“So?"

“First—he was reluctant to wade in and invest. You know, he never totally trusted these guys—it was all so bizarre. And he'd seen some of these pipe dreams fall apart. But what I'm saying is, I just recalled that there was a big flurry of paperwork on it. The company had their access routes that they didn't want him ‘muddying up'—I remember that particular phrase. It was fine for him to cash in on surrounding land and whatnot, but there were certain areas he wasn't to mess with. This was when it was all real secretive, and they had a code name and stuff."

“A code name?"

“Yeah. I just remembered that. He wasn't supposed to refer to the Ecoworld project by name in any fax or cable or whatever. There was a mound of telegrams and night letters and stuff—and I know he wasn't carrying all that around in his briefcase. I'll bet all the paperwork is still tucked away—either in the office or at home."

“Think you could find it?"

“I can't imagine where to start looking that I haven't already looked. It probably wouldn't tell us anything we don't already know. Joseph Fisher would probably let us look at their copies if we said something."

“Maybe ... What was the code word?"

“Oh...” She thought for a while. A lot of time had gone by, and her mind didn't seem to want to function. “Rampage? No ... mm ... something about the waterworks.
Ramparts!
That was it.

“The idea of a code name—Sam thought it was kind of silly. As if somebody would know what the heck Ecoworld meant. I just finished reading about it and I still don't know."

Mary had turned in the seat, and her skirt pulled up more than she meant it to. He kept his eyes on the road, but that was okay. He knew every sweet dimple and lovely curve. He knew all too well what those beautiful legs looked like.

“I'm sorry, Mary,” he told her.

“Hm?"

“You know—” He didn't say it. Just covered her hand with his. “Everything.” He let it go.

She thought he seemed different. In school he'd been the least likely guy to end up as some skanky doper. He was more like the Royce she remembered.

“Yeah,” she said, and it was as much a whispered prayer as anything else.

Royce took his hand away. Without saying anything, she'd spoken to him in the intimate language of old friends and lovers, and there was no way on God's earth he'd put a move on her. All he wanted to do was start over. Turn the clock back and start acting like a man for a change.

He'd told himself a thousand times he was over her, always knowing that was complete bullshit. You didn't “get over” Mary Perkins, with that soft skin and that mouth and those sweet ways and those legs. You didn't get cured of her. Mary was fatal.

She'd left a part of herself in every place where they'd been together, like a Persian cat shedding small, fluffy balls of itself, insubstantial but real legacies that would catch in the currents of the air like microscopic tumbleweeds, and come back to whisper to you.

Just about the time you'd kicked the Mary habit, you'd chance upon an errant long hair in an unexpected place, and you'd hear that lovely voice, her throaty, warm contralto, or you'd see that natural, sexy, skinny-legged, loose walk of hers in your mind, or you'd smell the fragrance of her memory, and—
wham!
No cure. Jonesin’ for Mary. It dawned on him that it had been days since he'd done lines. How weird. His new jones: Mary-wanna. Hey, Mary ... Wanna?

Mary knew she was feeling something toward Royce that she shouldn't. It was an emotion she'd been fighting.

What was it about some men? There were those certain guys who could get on a woman's wavelength. Her junkie lover of long ago, with the wide, lopsided smile so full of unexpected warmth and tenderness, he'd been one of those. He could send her into a mood swing the way north draws the needle of a compass. Explain it? She couldn't even define it.

All she knew was that they occupied two different worlds—physically, spiritually, and sexually—yet he nudged her at the oddest times in a way that could only be compared to the desire for a guilty pleasure. And it wasn't sex, truly. Sam had been a sensual lover and sufficiently ardent and gentle to keep her content in that department. Mary realized that it was something more than sex or romance, a deep and not insubstantial part of her that was drawn to this man.

That night she dreamed of him, watching herself enter a room where Royce Hawthorne was. She sees herself as a vision, suggesting the best of early Perry Ellis and most inspired Marc Jacobs, the classiest Geoffrey Beene tailored with flashes of striking Armani, the tearoomiest Ralph Lauren with a hint of Ms. Herrera, mixed and matched by the latest kids—the ones with the unpronounceable names—and just a spritz of Fredericks. The vision moves.

His beautiful eyes follow the deep V-cut of the double-breasted black gabardine with the gold buttons, devouring her with his gaze. She feels the heat of his look. The vision at her best, striding through the room in a scented cloud of Opium, Poison, and Serpent's Eve—her special bedroom fragrance that triumphs over Royce's masculine aromas and engulfs the room in heady perfume. Royce, captivated, comes to her.

He offers her his arm and she takes it, seeing his old leather jacket with the worn elbows, imagining his forearms bulging with thick, ropy veins between the ridges of hard muscle, wanting to feel his big hands touch her again.

In the car the vision's tousled hair is the colors of brandy and champagne, streaked with highlights, lips glossy and desirable, and as she turns, the skirt rides up on her legs—which he tells her are “still A-one.” She is in the front seat with Royce, in her cognac-colored wool jacket with the stone white poorboy turtleneck, and she watches him not look at her thighs.

Fear-shackled, tragedy-pinioned guilt speaks to her in a familiar man's voice.

“Mary?” She turns and looks for Sam, treading water, doing her best not to drown in the dizzying, unexpected waves of whatever this emotion is.

Royce wanted to open up to Mary. That was a problem. He couldn't. Not right now—the way things were hanging. Too much was going on. There was too much at stake. He was carrying too much baggage.

How could he ever begin to explain it to her—about the dope? He knew that she knew he'd fallen into the cracks, somewhere along the line. Royce could see it in her eyes sometimes, that how-did-you-let-yourself-get-this-way stare. Where does one start trying to explain a life? Your weakness and your vices and your mistakes look so easy to control when one is on the outside looking in.

He'd grown up in Waterton, just as Mary had. Born in 1962, in a hinterlands bump in the road that hadn't changed since the Second World War—Waterton, Missouri, was an American ghost town. The only thing good about it was, a kid could drive across the river to Tennessee and get illegal schooners of cold beer, vodka-laced watermelons, or home-grown reefer that just about everybody tried at one time or another when they were in their teens.

Grass was no big deal. Some kids smoked wacky-tobacky and some drank. Some—like Royce—did both. It was something to do. You fired up a joint, got in somebody's ride with a half dozen close friends, and cruised.

He'd been withering away. He'd have died if he hadn't gotten out of Waterton. He'd wanted all the sex there was, all the high times he could find, and he'd wanted out. Mary'd had a marriage jones that he felt snaking out for him like a hangman's noose. He'd run. Things had happened. He'd met women. Fast-lane types. Big-city junkies who'd taught him how to get his nose open. He'd never been that crazy about weed anyway. One thing had led to another. No biggie—hell, George Washington had been a hemp farmer.

Royce had gotten jammed up in the worst way and had taken the only way out left to him. That's how he'd got himself inserted into this king-shit jackpot. He knew he was going to have to open up to Mary about it soon. She deserved to know. No. That was bullshit. She most certainly did not deserve any part of his act. But he'd already used their friendship—just because she was there, and handy—and he owed it to her to run the whole thing down. He had to make it right.

He locked the car, a study in pensive concentration and gloomy dope-fiend rumination, his mind far away, as he headed for the door of his cabin. He was not alert.

There was a huge presence in the shadows. Hulking. Silent. A man standing very quietly waiting for Royce Hawthorne.

The man was good. Very quiet. As Royce walked by the large trees, the shadows moved. Like a gigantic animal, the watching man stepped out from this hidden nocturnal post, and moved behind Royce.

It was only as the man stepped heavily on a dry twig that Royce realized there was someone behind him. He flashed on the massive apparition he'd seen out on Willow River Road. The presence chilled him and dried his throat. He was frightened to the bone. He'd let all his powers of concentration become lax—what an idiot!

He froze, barely containing himself as he felt fingers of steel grip him from behind.

They say you see your life flash before your eyes. He did not. He only saw huge fingers, a hand, the long arm, squeezing his shoulder and pulling him around. Nearly scaring him to death, as he looked into a frightening scowl. The menacing, bearded face of the ex-boxer, Luis Londoño.

“Hey."

“Jeezus! Man, don't
do
that!"

“Come on.” The massive head jerking to the side. Body like a small car standing on end. An immovable object.

“Yeah. Sure.” What was he supposed to say—no? I have to take a piano lesson first?

He didn't recognize the car.

“What's Happy been up to?” he said, trying to make conversation. Luis only grunted and drove. Royce was aware of the little toy knife in the holster taped to his leg. He could feel it. He let his knee move slowly, inching his left pant leg back just a bit with the weight of his left hand. No way. First, he would never get it out fast enough, and if he could—what then?

The heavyweight was as tough as nails. He'd picked up both his purple and green wings when he'd been a biker. The green was for having oral sex with a dead woman confirmed as having active gonorrhea at the time of death. Royce had never asked what the purple wings were for. Royce might get his little toad-sticker out and take his shot, and while Luis died, he'd rip his face off and wipe with it.