Deadliest of Sins (12 page)

Sixteen

By three fifteen Gudger
had learned that the black Miata pulled up in his driveway was registered to one Mary Crow, address Asheville, North Carolina. Her driving record was clean; she had no prior judgments, no outstanding warrants. The person she claimed to be looking for, Jonathan Walkingstick, did not live anywhere on Kedron Road. In fact, no Jonathan Walkingstick lived anywhere in Campbell County. “What the fuck?” he'd asked his old buddy Crump, who'd called in the plate numbers for him. “Why would some woman from Asheville be on my property, asking directions for somebody who doesn't exist?”

“What'd she look like?” asked Crump.

“Medium tall. Slender, short dark hair. Wore tan pants, turquoise earrings. Looked kind of Indian. Gave off a funny vibe—
almost like a cop.” Gudger strode into his bathroom and closed the door. He didn't want that idiot kid to hear any of this.

“Some dark-haired girl cop was here, Gudge,” Crump said. “I talked with her the other day. She's the governor's super cop, come to light a fire under Drake about that gay kid's case.”

“But why would she come out here? And talk to Shithead?”

Crump cleared his throat. “Uh, I think Shithead might have been talking to her.”

Gudger went cold inside. “What?”

“She was at the station, talking to the new hire. Then she started asking about your stepdaughter's case. The new guy called me in, 'cause he knew I'd worked the case. The woman claimed that Shithead had come to see her about it, in Asheville.”

“Asheville? How did Shithead get up there? He's afraid to step off the front porch.”

“I don't know, but she knew all about Sam. I told her your kid was a head case and you were a stand-up guy.”

“What did she say then?” Gudger was grasping his cell phone so hard his fingers had gone numb.

“Nothing—we talked about families for a minute, then she said that stepparenting was dicey work. I don't think she's here about you, man,” Crump assured him. “She's all about hanging that queer's murder on Trull. She probably drove out to your place to tell Shithead he was crazy.”

“I still can't believe that little asshole went all the way to Asheville to talk to some girl cop about Sam.”

“I don't know, buddy. You'll have to ask him.”

“Yeah,” said Gudger. “That's exactly what I'm going to do. Thanks for running that plate for me, Crump. See you next week at poker.”

Gudger clicked off the phone, then jerked the door open, expecting to see Chase standing there, eavesdropping. The room, however, was empty. All he saw was his bedspread smooth on his mattress, his dresser clean and uncluttered. Amy's side of the room was considerably messier, but he couldn't deal with Amy's slovenliness now. Now he needed to deal with Amy's son. With his heart beating like something trying to claw its way out of his chest, he pocketed his cell phone and headed for the den. He had to find out how bad this was, how deep this went.

Shithead was sitting on the couch, watching some TV show about the Lewis and Clark expedition. He walked over, grabbed a handful of the boy's hair, and lifted him to his feet. Chase's face contorted in pain.

“Ow!” he cried, trying to squirm away. “That hurts!”

“You might be hurting a lot more in a few minutes. Turn off that TV, boy. You and I are gonna have a little talk.”

He released the boy's hair. Sniffling back tears, the kid grabbed the remote. The TV screen went black.

“What's the matter?” Chase asked. “I was just watching the History Channel.”

Gudger stood there, legs spread, arms akimbo, glaring at the child. Though the medicine he'd brought the boy had turned his red blisters into a sick shade of pink, the kid still looked like his face had been cooked in a microwave. Gudger let him stand there for a long moment, then he spoke.

“How the hell did you hook up with Mary Crow?”

The boy paled beneath his welts. “I-I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You don't know the pretty gal you were talking to when I came home?”

“I-don't know …”

“What do you mean you don't know? I know.” Gudger grinned. He'd caught the boy, dead to rights. “Mary Crow works for the governor. She came down here to poke around that gay murder case.”

The boy had no answer. He just stood there, his eyes wide with fear.

Gudger knelt down, nose to nose with Chase. “What I really wonder is why that particular woman, who works ninety miles away in Asheville, was on my front porch, asking directions to someone who doesn't exist?”

The boy's chin began to quiver, but then he set his jaw and lowered his head, focusing his gaze on the floor.

“You know what I think?” Gudger continued as the boy stared at his shoelaces. “I don't think you've told me the truth all week. I don't think you've told me the truth since the day I tore down that stupid pool.”

He made no response, so Gudger kept on.

“You said you spent the day playing in the creek and just lost track of the time. But I think maybe you were doing something else. Something you had no business doing. Am I right or am I wrong?”

The boy stood silent.

“You know, Chase, real men tell the truth. I bet if your daddy were here, he'd look me in the eye and tell me exactly what had happened that day.”

The boy lifted his head, his eyes suddenly dark with hatred. “If my daddy were here, he'd break your jaw.”

A rage went through Gudger—there seemed no way he could escape the ghost of John Buchanan. He felt him in his wife's embrace, had seen him in the disgusted curl of Samantha's lip—now he was here, in the person of his sniveling, knock-kneed son, threatening to break his jaw. This was it; he would hear from John Buchanan's ghost no longer.

“Oh, yeah?” he said, rising to his feet. “We'll just see about that, boy.”

He stalked into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of hot sauce from the kitchen cabinet, then returned. “I'll give you one more chance … why were you talking to Mary Crow?”

Chase looked at him, his mouth shut, but his eyes defiant.

“Okay, buddy,” said Gudger. “Don't say I didn't warn you.” He uncapped the bottle of red-orange liquid and started sprinkling it all over the boy's poison ivy welts. Seconds later tears came to the boy's
eyes, then he started twisting and squirming as if fire ants were
attacking him. He turned to run to the bathroom, but Gudger grabbed his hair and held him in place.

“You answer my question, you can wash that stuff off. Until then, you're staying right here.”

Chase held out through two more applications of hot sauce, then as Gudger uncorked the bottle for the third time, he started to cry.

“I went to see her about Sam,” he confessed, gasping as snot began to drip from his nose.

“How'd you get up there?” cried Gudger. “Asheville's a long way away.”

“I hitched a ride on a peach truck.”

Gudger looked at the boy, stunned. The fact that Shithead had hitched a ride to anywhere seemed as unlikely as his going out for the football team. “What did you tell her about Samantha?”

Twitching, the boy furiously scratched the welts on his arms. “I told her I didn't think the cops here had done enough about her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she'd look into it.” He wiped his nose. “Then she brought me home.”

Gudger glared at him, hot sauce in hand. “What else?”

“Nothing,” the boy said, miserable. “There wasn't nothing else to tell.”

“Why was she up here on the porch?”

“She said nobody ever answers our phone, so she came by. She said Sam probably ran off with some boy, just like everybody else thinks.”

Gudger looked at the kid. He doubted he was telling the whole story, but between the poison ivy and the hot sauce and the dripping snot, he was a mess. It was going on five o'clock; Amy would be home soon. Though Amy was as flat a doormat as you'd find, she would not be pleased if she came home and found her precious son looking like this. “I'm not done with you, but for now, go get that stuff washed off
.
”

Weeping, the little boy ran to the bathroom.

“Just remember I gave you the chance to act like a man, Chase,” Gudger yelled through the door. “So don't you go whining to your mama when she comes home.”

While the boy went to clean himself off, Gudger retreated to the garage. He closed and locked the door behind him, then he reached behind the paint cans on one high shelf and pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey. He took a long pull, trying to slow the edgy thrumming that echoed in his head. He needed to calm down, think about the best thing to do. Had Shithead actually put everything together? All the stupid kid did was read books and watch the History Channel. Yet he'd connected the dots better than every cop in the county and then blabbed his stupid, crackpot theory to the governor's girl in Asheville.

“Damn!” he whispered, taking another swallow of whiskey. “Who knew the little fuck was so smart?”

Now the question was, how much had Shithead figured out? And what had he told this Mary Crow? She'd seemed friendly enough when they talked, going on about being a stepparent. Still, there was something about her—behind the mascara and the pretty smile, her eyes were bright as a hawk's, watching him in a way that made him nervous inside.

Suddenly, he heard a car coming up the driveway. For an instant he panicked, thinking it was Mary Crow coming back, this time bringing real cops with her. But when he looked out the window—he saw only Amy's Dodge.
Damn
, he thought.
I need to get back inside before Shithead rats me out.
But before that, he needed to call Smiley. Whatever trouble Shithead might cause would be a picnic in the park compared to what Smiley could do. Taking a steadying slug of whiskey, he pulled out his cell phone and punched in the first number on speed dial. Smiley answered immediately, his voice a growl.

“Smiley, this is Gudger.”

“Yeah?”

Gudger swallowed hard, the Wild Turkey threatening to fly back up his throat. “We may have a problem.”

“So talk to me.” Smiley's accent was Eastern—New York, New Jersey—it all sounded the same to Gudger.

“It's my wife's kid,” explained Gudger. “He's cooked up some crazy theory about his sister—you know, the girl. A couple of days ago he hitched a ride up to Asheville and got the governor's cop in on it.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No. I just found out a few minutes ago.”

“How much does he know for real?”

“I don't know. I couldn't get it out of him.”

“How much does the cop know?”

“Don't know that either,” said Gudger. “But today I came home and she was on my front porch, talking to the kid.”

“The cop's a she?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus, Gudger. Your stepkid rats you out to the governor's cop? What the hell kind of family are you running over there?”

“I don't know,” Gudger said miserably. “I had no idea the boy was this smart.”

“Yeah? Well, I had no idea you were this stupid.” Smiley's voice could have etched glass.

Again, the sour taste of whiskey roiled in the back of Gudger's throat. He stood there, watching out the window for Amy, suddenly as twitchy as Chase covered in hot sauce. Finally, Smiley spoke.

“This cop got a name?”

“Crow. Mary Crow,” Gudger answered quickly, a small tendril of relief inching toward him. Smiley was now focusing on Mary Crow instead of him.

“Mary Crow.” Smiley repeated the name, as if he were making notes on something. Gudger waited, tapping his foot, eager to offer up what other information Smiley wanted. After several moments, he spoke again.

“I gotta tell you, Gudger. This is way off my grid. I gotta call my boss.”

Gudger felt a great rippling in his bowels. Smiley was bad enough; he didn't even want to think about his boss. He clutched the phone harder. “Who's that?”

“Doesn't matter, but he'll probably send somebody to see you. And sooner than later, probably.”

“But when? Tonight? Tomorrow? What are they going to do?”

Smiley growled. “I don't know, you stupid jackass. But odds are real good you aren't gonna like it.”

Seventeen

Sam awoke with a
start. She'd been in a terrifying, coma-like sleep, aware of only a thick darkness that pressed down upon her like a coffin
. This is what death must be like
, a voice told her.
No angels, no tunnel of light, nothing but an impenetrable emptiness that went on forever. It would just be her, all alone with no light and no sound—only her own consciousness, screaming for release, until eons hence, it, too, would flicker and die, joining the black void that surrounded it. The notion terrified her so that she screamed and pulled herself back from some unseen precipice. She sat up in bed, gasping and dizzy, grateful for the anemic fluorescent light that buzzed from the ceiling.

“I'm alive,” she whispered, trembling—amazed that her lungs were still pulling in air, that her mouth still formed words. She wondered, for a moment, how her mind could have concocted a dream of such horror, then she remembered the Turk and his tea. He must have put something in it, to make her dream such a thing, she decided. A drug to subdue her, or maybe just frighten her into submission. Whatever it was, she wasn't drinking it again. She didn't care if he pinched her shoulder until she died. She'd swallowed her last cup of Yusuf's tea.

She looked around the room. She was still in the second one—the silent one without Ivan's bloodstains on the wall. A tray of food sat on the bureau, next to her bed. A cheese sandwich, covered in plastic wrap, an apple. As she stared at it, her stomach gave a loud growl; she realized she had no idea how long she'd been asleep. Hours? Days? She couldn't tell—no light seeped from around the window, and the florescent flickered all the time.

She reached for the tray and unwrapped the sandwich. Though the bread was stale and the cheese gummy, it still tasted wonderful. She wolfed it down, wishing she had another. She ate the apple, then suddenly, her stomach began to cramp. Throwing off her blanket, she hurried to the bathroom. As she sat down on the toilet, she saw that someone had left a cardboard box on the back of the toilet. Inside, she found a toothbrush and toothpaste, a small bar of soap, and a box of sanitary napkins.

“Are you kidding me?” She opened the box and pulled out one of the thick, cumbersome pads. She'd used them only once, for her first period, when she was twelve years old. Every month since she'd inserted tampons, preferring them to the bulky alternative.

Suddenly, she started to laugh. “They must want to keep my vagina clean of foreign objects.” Disgusted, she stuffed the pad back in the box. How strange to be in a place where being a virgin made you special. At school, it made you the butt of jokes, put you on the Loser List of girls who never got asked out. But how could she have helped it? She was new at her school, and her mother made her come straight home every day and keep Chase safe from the crackheads next door. She barely got a chance to glance at a boy, much less have sex with one.

As her gut gave an ominous rumble, she put her head in her hands and sighed. She'd had no idea how good she'd had it, back then. Right now she would give anything to be at that crappy little duplex, playing Clue with Chase, trying to convince him that their drugged-out neighbors were too stoned to break down their door.

“But that was then,” she told herself sternly, wiping her eyes. “This is now.” She flushed the toilet, then unwrapped the red toothbrush that lay in the box. As she brushed her teeth, she gazed in the mirror. Was this the same shattered glass she'd looked at earlier and decided she would kill herself with if things became unbearable?

Yes
, she decided, staring at her kaleidoscopic reflection.
It was. And I will. And I'll take as many of these bastards with me as I can.

She finished cleaning her teeth and rinsed her mouth in the yellowish water. After that she returned to her room to see if she could get anything beyond a shopping channel on that dopey-looking TV. If she could get a weather report, she might be able to figure out where she was and how long she'd been here. She'd just clicked the set on when the pipes in the bathroom started banging.

Ignoring the noise, she twisted the dial of the ancient TV. Through a screen of thick snow, she heard only Spanish programming—an overheated soap opera, then a woman chattering on what sounded like a talk show. She twisted the dial around three times, then turned the set off. Silence resumed, broken only by the banging pipes. Sinking to the floor, she buried her head in hands. In the first room she'd at least been connected with people—the girls going back and forth, Ivan bringing her food and tales of his Russian boyfriends. Here she had nothing but horrific dreams and crappy plumbing.

As she sat there, longing to hear someone speak a language she understood, she grew angry at the noisy pipes. “Shut up!” she finally cried, getting to her feet and hurrying into the bathroom. Maybe if she flushed the toilet again it would be quiet. She reached over to pull the lever on the thing, when she realized that the clanging wasn't coming from the toilet at all—it was coming from the pipe beneath the sink.

She knelt down, wondering if the U-trap was loose. Suddenly, the tapping grew much louder, taking on a new rhythm. Three taps, followed by a brief silence, followed by three more taps, followed by another silence. She sat back on her heels, her heart pounding. Was someone in the next bathroom? Were they trying to send her a message?

She reached for her toothbrush. Crouching beneath the sink again, she started tapping on the pipes herself—three shorts, three longs, then three short taps again. SOS in Morse code, a silly thing Chase had once taught her from one of his detective novels, in case they were ever on a sinking ship. She finished tapping her message, then listened. She heard nothing for so long that she decided she must have dreamed the whole thing, but then, just as she was getting to her feet, she heard her message coming back through the pipes—three shorts, three longs, then three shorts again.

Oh my God!
she thought.
There's someone on the other side of that wall!

She tapped back, this time just three short ones. The tapper answered in kind, then Sam saw the U-trap beneath her sink begin to wiggle. She realized that her sink and the one next door must drain into a single pipe—if she could remove the collar that covered the hole where the pipe entered the wall, then she might be able to talk to whoever was tapping. Sam crawled beneath the sink, wiped some mildew away from the sink baffle, and pressed her mouth close to the wall. “Can you hear me?” she whispered, praying that she wasn't blundering into a trap set by the Turk, or worse, that guy Boris.

At first she heard nothing. For a moment she thought it was a trap and the Turk would come barreling through the door to pour more tea down her throat. But then the tapping began again, this time rapid and urgent. When it stopped, Sam spoke again.

“Try to take off the collar that covers your sink pipe,” she whispered to whomever it was. “I'll do the same.”

She got to her feet, desperate to find something to loosen the collar with. The medicine cabinet was empty; the shards of the broken mirror would only break further in attempting to loosen a screw. Beyond that, the bathroom offered only a toothbrush and the box of sanitary napkins. She hurried to the bedroom, checking the drawers of the bureau. They held nothing beyond sci-fi paperbacks, printed in an alphabet she couldn't read. She looked under the bed, in the closet, but found nothing. She tried to pry off the TV's antenna, but it was attached firmly to the back of the set. Desperate, she lifted her mattress and looked at the box springs that supported it. Though they were old and squeaked every time she turned over in bed, they were far too strong for her to break off.

“Damn!” she whispered. “There's got to be something!”

She circled the room like a caged animal, searching for something she could make into a tool. There was nothing—the room had only a bed, a TV, and a single piece of furniture. Frustrated, she began to rub the place on her shoulder where the Turk had squeezed. As she moved her bra strap out of the way, she suddenly realized she'd had a tool all along! Quickly, she lifted her T-shirt and took off her bra. The little metal hooks that fastened the thing around her just might also loosen those screws!

Pulling her T-shirt back on, she ran to the bathroom, bra in hand. She ducked under the sink and listened for any sounds from the other side of the wall. No more tapping, but a scraping sound reached her ears, as if her companion was mirroring her efforts in the other bathroom.

She looked at the hooks of her bra—two, both tiny, both bent from many trips through the washing machine. She took the least bent one and began to work with it. At first the thing slipped off the screw every time she tried to turn it, but she figured out that if she leaned forward and applied pressure as she turned it, it would at least stay in place. With sweat trickling into her eyes, she kept pushing and trying to turn the stubborn screw. As the ends of her fingers grew numb with the effort, she decided it was hopeless, that she and whoever-it-was next door would never be able to see each other. Then, as she gave a final try, she felt the screw turn a fraction of an inch. She changed hands and worked on, pressing the bra hook into the screw until it slipped out, then beginning all over again. As her legs began to cramp, the first screw loosened to the point that she could grab it in her fingers. She unscrewed the first one. It dropped to the floor with a
ping
. She was halfway home.

Wiping the sweat from her forehead, she put the bra hook to work on the second. This one was rusted, even harder to turn than the first.

“No!” she whispered. “You aren't stopping me now!” She took the other, more bent bra hook and scraped the rust from the base of the screw. When she had a small pile of brown filings on the bathroom floor, she started in on the screw. At first, she couldn't budge it, then all at once, as if something had given way, the thing began to move. Desperately, she turned it, faster and faster. Then the second screw was falling to the floor, the collar of the sink pipe spinning away from the wall.

With a fervent prayer that she wasn't going to find the Turk or that creep Boris leering at her from the other side of the wall, she crouched down and peered through the hole. At first she saw only the dark backside of more plumbing, but then she saw cracks of light as another fixture loosened. She heard a scrape, then the sharp
ding
of metal against metal, then she saw the person who'd done all the tapping—a pretty blond girl whose tear-streaked face reminded her of her own.