Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (16 page)

Boar Hog gave a heavy sigh. He glanced longingly at my beer and then took a birdlike sip of soda, grimacing in distaste. “I’m in the program,” he said. “A.A. God willing, next month I’ll be three years clean and sober.”

“Yeah? That’s great. Good for you,” I said, raising my beer in congratulations.

He nodded grimly. “I’ve been working the steps, trying to make amends for all the hurt I caused—”

I realized where he was going with all this and cut him off. “Hell, Boar Hog—” I had a slight buzz going now, and I’d forgotten he’d asked me to call him Clarence. “You don’t owe me nothing. We’re fighters, man. Hurt comes with the territory.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand, Reggie.” He sighed like he’d been gut-punched. “When we fought, I was … I was wearing loaded gloves.”

“Say what?”

“Plaster,” he said. “On my hand wraps. Christ, I was hitting you with sledgehammers that night. For the life of me, I don’t know how you took it for as long as you did. It damn near killed me just to
land
that many shots. The ref hadn’t stopped it when he did, I don’t think I could’ve climbed off my stool for another round.”

“Loaded gloves …” was all I could say.

He nodded sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Reggie. Truly I am.”

I glanced at my beer like it was giving me counsel.

Boar Hog said, “I guess you probably want to take a swing at me?”

“Ah, what the hell’s that gonna solve?”

But I slugged him to the floor all the same.

He peered up at me, blinking and rubbing his jaw. “Guess I deserved that.”

I offered him my hand and helped him back to his feet.

“We square, Reggie?”

I sighed. “You can cross my name off your list.”

Boar Hog beamed like a pug-ugly cherub, blood glistening on his split lip.

“Thanks, Reggie.”

We made some more small talk, but he’d come here to say what he wanted to say, and The Henhouse was no place for a recovering alcoholic—or a borderline functional one, now that I think of it—and pretty soon he left.

I walked him to the door and we shook hands.

“No hard feelings, Reggie?”

“You bet.”

I watched him drive away and then I sat back down at my regular spot at the end of the slab, thinking things through the only way I knew how, with a beer in my hand and a dumbfounded look on my mug.

Walt started wet-ragging the slab all around me, not saying anything.

“Just say it,” I said.

“Loaded gloves, huh?”

I nodded. “Loaded gloves …”

“And you
still
took that big bastard life and death.”

The thought had already occurred to me, but I didn’t say anything.

“So what d’you reckon, kid?”

I glanced up at Walt.

“Any gas left in the tank?”

I sucked in my gut and squared my shoulders, looking long and hard at my reflection in the back-bar mirror. And then I let out my breath and deflated.

“I’m too old for that shit,” I said.

And it’s a funny thing—but for the first time I was okay with just wondering what could’ve been.

* * *

No next of kin came forward to claim the body of Jameson T. Salisbury. I felt a pang of compassion for the crazy bastard—that there was no one to mourn his passing. If it wasn’t for Salisbury, those Damn Dirty Apes would’ve killed me. Of course, if it wasn’t for Salisbury, I wouldn’t have been caught up in the whole sorry mess to start with. I continue to have mixed feelings about the man.

All the same, I paid for his funeral service and a small headstone with some of my movie money. Salisbury was buried in a modest grave in Bigelow cemetery. The boneyard is on the far side of town, way out by the Sticks. Shortly before she decamped to Hollywood, Eliza and me drove out there to pay our respects. I didn’t know Salisbury’s date of birth, or much else about him except that he was certifiably insane. But I couldn’t put that on the headstone, so the marker just read SKUNK APE HUNTER, which you might argue is a roundabout way of saying the same thing. Still, I reckon he would’ve approved of that epitaph.

Eliza and me didn’t have much to say in the way of kind words, so we just stood silent vigil at his grave for as long as propriety demanded. We were turning to leave when suddenly an unearthly howl rose from the depths of the Sticks.

As the chilling cry echoed over the boneyard, Eliza gasped: “Is that … ?”

I could only shake my head. “Can’t be …”

But as the cry faded away—and we hurried from the cemetery—I couldn’t help thinking that what we had heard was the Bigelow Skunk Ape paying his own respects to the greatest foe his kind had ever known.

“I’m the most cold-hearted sonofabitch you’ll ever meet.” —Ted Bundy

MAY 16, 1993

The night of the massacre, Luella was foraging for comfort food in the refrigerator she shared with her sisters at the Kappa Pi sorority house.

It had been a shitty day for Luella. First the results of her term paper— all those weeks of hard work for nothing but a lousy B—then, as she commiserated over chocolate-chip cookies in the cafeteria, she’d overheard Todd Greenway make a cutting remark about her figure—“Check it out: Feeding time at the zoo”—that caused his hangers-on to howl with laughter. As she raided the refrigerator that night, the cruel laughter still ringing in her ears, Luella knew stuffing her fat disgusting face with Krispy Kremes was no way to help matters, but she was powerless, shoveling down donuts in the secret darkness of the kitchen.

The knock at the door startled her. She jerked her head guiltily from the refrigerator. Glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. Almost one a.m. She’d thought her sisters were all present and accounted for and sleeping soundly in their beds, scolded herself for not making sure of it before she crept downstairs to raid the refrigerator. Peeking outside, she saw a young man standing on the back porch. He had his arm slung around what at first glance Luella thought was a life-size mannequin. Then she recognized the long frizz of Irish-red hair hanging over the mannequin’s face and sighed.

This wasn’t the first time Susan had come home shitfaced. Usually whichever guy had been loading her with booze dumped her home in the morning after getting his money’s worth. Luella supposed it was a checkmark in
this
guy’s favor. Susan’s partying was getting way out of hand. She’d been warned if she kept it up she risked flunking out. Luella liked Susan. Hoped she’d see sense and pull back from the brink before it was too late.

She unlocked the door and opened it.

The young man smiled at her sheepishly. “I think your friend had a little too much to drink,” he said, like he had no idea how it might’ve happened.

Luella sighed again. “She does that.”

She gestured for the man to bring her inside.

“Do you mind?” she whispered. “If the house mother sees her like this again she’ll freak.”

The man hesitated a moment. Glanced about the yard. Luella figured that before he’d seen the light of the refrigerator, he’d been planning to leave Susan on the porch-swing and scram. But he nodded dutifully and lugged her inside and Luella closed the door softly behind him.

In the dim light of the kitchen, Luella saw he was older than she’d first thought. Late twenties at least. Boyishly handsome, with long lashes and blowtorch-blue eyes, his sharp features faintly lined, Luella found herself flicking her hair reflexively and hoping she didn’t have any Krispy Kreme frosting smeared around her lips. Not that he’d be interested in
her
. And that depressing thought would require another donut (or two) after he left.

The man started saying: “Where—?”

Luella raised a finger to his lips. Mimed: people sleeping upstairs.

“Where do you, uh … want her?” he whispered.

“Can you bring her through to the lounge?” Luella said. “I should probably try and sober her up.”

The man laughed softly. “Good luck with that.”

She led the way to the lounge and motioned for him to set Susan on the couch. He lowered her gently onto the cushioned seat, and then slumped down beside her to catch his breath.
It could’ve been worse, buddy
, Luella thought.
You could have been carrying
me. She kneeled in front of Susan and took her hands to try and rouse her. “Christ, she’s freezing.”

The man nodded. “It’s cold out.”

Luella brushed Susan’s long red hair from her face.

Couldn’t help snickering. “She is
totally
wasted—”

And then Susan’s head lolled back against the headrest, flopping to the side at an angle that made Luella wince, the bone of her broken vertebrae bulging grotesquely from her neck. Luella glanced in sudden terror at the smiling young man with the piercing blue eyes. Before she could scream, the knife in his hand glinted in the gloom, and her scream became a sigh that sputtered and hissed from a slashed throat. She slid soundlessly to the rug, clutching at the gushing wound, the warmth bleeding out between her fingers as the man stalked upstairs to wake her sisters.

If Billy Joe Carrick was running the world, a mad dog killer like Terrence Hingle wouldn’t be seeing out his days in no cushy state nuthouse. He’d be deader than Old Yeller and it would’ve been Billy Joe Carrick who put him down. A bullet for every girl he killed. Unfortunately, Billy Joe wasn’t running the world. A bunch of liberal assholes were. And so, on the fourth anniversary of the Kappa Pi Massacre, like he did every year the old cop made the long drive out to Pine Grove State Hospital to try and get the sonofabitch to talk.

Against his better judgment, when Hingle was committed, Carrick had made a solemn vow to the families of the victims that come hell or high water he’d bring Hingle to account. For the grieving loved ones, perhaps the cruelest cut of all was that no one knew why this young man, with no criminal record or history of violence, had suddenly snapped and butchered five girls. It just seemed so fucking senseless. But four years later, and the families were no closer to knowing. Hingle still hadn’t uttered a word—not to Carrick or to anyone else. And now that fool promise he’d made was eating away at Billy Joe like a cancer.

He was one year shy of being pensioned off the force, and he dreaded not keeping his word. Even worse was not knowing himself why Hingle had murdered those girls, and restoring some semblance of reason to this gone-to-shit world. Carrick could picture himself in retirement: Staying up nights and brooding on it endlessly, with only his pistol and a bottle of hooch for company. What he’d seen at that crime scene would gnaw through his brain like a worm in a rotten apple. If he couldn’t get Hingle to talk, Carrick gave himself three years tops before he ate his own pistol.

Carrick tried not to let his desperation show as he stared at the mad dog sitting opposite him. The two men were locked inside a cramped concrete box that had all the charm of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Sallow light smeared the room; the light fixture was filled with the husks of dead flies, the bulb buzzing like their ghosts. The stark white walls were Rorschach-blotted with faded nicotine stains in which Carrick saw the faces of the dead girls. He could almost hear them whispering to him …
Why?
Begging for the answers that would lay them to rest.

The mad dog was slumped in his chair like a puppet with its strings cut. Wearing striped hospital pajamas and a ratty blue robe, his glazed eyes stared across the table, straight through Carrick, and a thousand-yards yonder. Mouth hanging open, a rope of drool dangled from his bottom lip, dripping like a leaking faucet. His hands were folded neatly in his lap; slender and ladylike, it was hard to believe those dainty little hands had butchered five sorority sisters.

“Terrence,” Carrick said. “You might’ve fooled that old judge and these headshrinkers, but you don’t fool me.” He crinkled his face like a cornpone Columbo. “Now how much longer do you plan on playing possum for?”

Another drip-drop of drool.

Carrick sighed.

The headshrinkers called it—when they weren’t using fancy words—a complete mental breakdown. As if the horrors Hingle inflicted on those sorority sisters had driven him plumb out of his mind. Carrick understood how that was possible. Just viewing the crime scene had damn near had the same effect on him. A thirty-year veteran of some of the worst godforsaken shitholes in the state, he’d thought he’d seen every depravity that one human being could inflict on another. He was wrong. Dead wrong.

He remembered that night at Kappa Pi. Arriving to find the sorority house awash in the flashing lights of the cop cars and the EMS vehicles swarming outside. Remembered entering the hall and his feeling of icy dread as the rich red carpet squelched beneath his shoes and he realized what he was standing in. Hanging by her hair from the landing rail above him was Luella Potton. Carrick thought she was smiling, at first; a big crimson ear-to-ear smile carved across her throat. He’d followed the trail of blood upstairs to the room where the remains of the other girls were heaped like something a gator had upchucked. The same room where Hingle had been caught in the act by the college cops, literally red-handed, as he garroted the last of the girls with her roommate’s intestines—

Carrick pushed the memory away. He couldn’t get Hingle to talk and he’d have the rest of his life to dwell on what he saw that awful night. He loosened his tie and rubbed at his throat. Rolled up his shirtsleeves and stole a glance at his wristwatch. Quarter to five in the p.m. The seconds were ticking down on his career as a po-lice. Just fifteen more minutes before his last hour with Hingle was up. Fifteen minutes to keep his word to the families and get answers.

Carrick glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. Checked that the orderly posted outside wasn’t watching through the Judas hatch. Fetched his hipflask from the pocket of the coat draped over his chair back. Poured a generous shot into the Styrofoam cup of cold coffee on the table next to the file folder. Took a nip from the cup, baring his teeth as he choked it down.

Then he flipped the file folder open.

No reaction from Hingle.