Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (17 page)

The crime scene photos were paperclipped together. Carrick thumbed loose the paperclip. Placed it on the table next to his coffee. He started tossing the photos across the table like he was dealing cards. Didn’t look at the photos himself. No need. All he had to do was shut his eyes.

“Look at them, boy,” Carrick growled. He’d coddled this degenerate punk long enough. “By Christ, you’re gonna look at these photos if I have to claw the eyeballs out of your skull—and then you’re going to tell me why … WHY?”

He thumped his fist down hard on the table, knocking over his cup, black coffee bleeding across the crime scene photos. With a curse, Carrick righted the cup and then fished in his pocket for a snot-rag to mop up the mess.

Behind him, the Judas hatch clanged open. The orderly’s eyes peered through the slit. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” Carrick grunted, and waited for the hatch to clang shut.

When he looked back at Hingle, the mad dog had one of the photos in his hands. He was gaping at the image, eyes blinking rapidly, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks and swelling to black balloons as he struggled to focus on it.

Carrick nearly lurched in surprise from his chair. For all the animation Hingle had shown on his previous visits, the madman might well have been tap-dancing on the table. Was this it, at long last, was the sonofabitch finally going to crack?

Carrick quickly composed himself. “You see, Terrence?” he said. “You see what you done?”

Hingle raised a hand from his lap. Swiped the drool from his lips. His eyes darted between the other photos on the table. Like he was spoiled for choice and didn’t know which one to pick up next. He fanned them out before him. Hunched over the table to peer at them closely. His mouth began working soundlessly. His cheeks flushed with color. He bull-snorted breath. Shoulders hitching spasmodically as if a great cry was building up inside him.

“That’s it,” Carrick encouraged him. “You remember now, don’t you, boy? Now tell me why?” He reached across the table and gave Hingle a reassuring pat on the hand, suppressing a shudder as he remembered those hands had been elbow-deep in girl-guts. “Why? Why’d you do it?”

Hingle’s head jerked up. He looked the lawman cold in the eye.

“More …” he croaked, his neglected voice barely audible.

Carrick frowned. Four years, and that’s the first thing he says? He didn’t understand. Christ, were there other victims?
Before
Kappi Pi? Keep him talking … “More?”

And then he let out a cry of disgust as he realized what Hingle was doing.

Carrick lurched to his feet, chair clattering to the floor behind him. On the other side of the table, the sick sonofabitch had his dick in his hand and he was beating it like it owed him money. Hingle bared his teeth at Carrick in a bestial grin, and then he hunched back over the photos, his hand drumming the underside of the table as he jerked himself, moaning as he neared climax.

Carrick shook his head in numb horror. He’d hoped the photos might wrench some kind of reaction from Hingle. But
this
… Rage boiled up inside him.

“Fuh—fuck … fucking … ANIMAL!”

Carrick heaved the table aside and hurled himself at Hingle.

Hingle’s chair overturned. They crashed down onto the grimy tiled floor.

Carrick landed on top of him. Gripped his head in his hands. Started beating the back of his skull on the floor. Five blows for five dead girls.

Susan Donnelly (BAM!)—

Luella Potton (BAM!)—

Katherine Marsh (BAM!)—

Donna Hastings (BAM!)—

Francine Chung (BAM!)—

The door exploded open behind them. A pack of white-uniformed orderlies dog-piled inside and dragged Carrick off him, kicking and screaming from the room. Carrick’s cries echoed down the corridor like he was just another nut checking into the nuthouse.

Hingle lay splayed in a daze on the floor, the crime scene photos strewn about him like storm debris—Hurricane Billy Joe—and as he waited for the orderlies to haul him off to the infirmary, Hingle closed his fist around the paperclip.

When Hingle regained consciousness later that night, he found himself cuffed to a steel-framed cot in the infirmary, shackled at each of his wrists to either side of the bed frame. The steel bracelets bit painfully into his flesh. Canvas restraints strapped down his legs. His skull was cocooned in bandages. His head throbbed like a hammered thumb. And yet he smiled.

The old cop was nothing if not predictable. Visiting him at the nuthouse every year on the anniversary of the murders. Having Hingle hauled from his cell and then dragged to the same stifling interview room. Shoving the crime scene photos in Hingle’s face like he was rubbing a dog’s nose in its own mess.

Expecting Hingle to be
ashamed
for what he’d done.

The old fool didn’t realize: His precious memories of those Kappa Pi girls were the only thing that’d kept him going all this time.

For four long years, he’d existed as a slack-jawed zombie, not speaking a word to anyone, just staring into space, drooling and soiling himself like a wet-brained wino—all the while secretly dreaming of the day he could be free again.

His only regret was being arrested; he’d been having so much fun playing doctor with those sorority girls, he didn’t hear the college cops until it was too late.

Hingle could’ve kissed the silly sonofabitch who clubbed him half to death with his nightstick. That use of excessive force had been the difference between the needle and his committal at Pine Grove. And oh, how Hingle had inwardly laughed at the public outcry when he escaped good Christian justice.

All things considered, the nuthouse wasn’t so bad. It sure beat being put to sleep like a dog. But Hingle had no intention of staying here.

And so he’d waited, watched, and every year the tired old cop, reeking of desperation, would come to interview him … until Hingle finally saw his way out.

Maybe once he was footloose and fancy free, he’d send the dumb bastard a thank you note, carved into the belly of the next gal he met.

Hingle gazed across the infirmary at the orderly posted on the door. The man’s chin rested on his chest. He was snoring softly. Just the two of them in the room.

A splinter of steel from the paperclip was buried beneath the skin of Hingle’s palm. He’d secreted it there while the orderlies were dragging the old cop off him. Curling his left hand inwards, careful not to clang his cuffs against the bed frame and wake Sleeping Dumbass, Hingle tweezed the splinter free with his thumbnail. He wiped the blood off the splinter onto his sheets, and then inserted it into the keyhole of the cuffs, and as he worked the lock with his improvised pick, searching for the sweet spot, his mind wandered back to when he’d first learned the trick.

* * *

Terry Lee Hingle was ten years old, living with his momma and the monkey on her back, and all the uncles a young boy could ever want, in a white trash ghetto apartment that made darktown look like Disneyland.

Momma’s pimp was a vice bull, Little Cyril Dupree, the kind of guy who pulls the wings off flies till he’s old enough to break arms and he takes up the badge.

He came for the rent every week, and for a piece of momma whenever else he felt like it. He’d toss his hat down on the table. Unbuckle his gunbelt and hang it like a saddle on the back of his chair. Sit in the kitchen, drinking and counting his cut and searching momma’s face for signs she was holding out on him. Dipping a hand in his pocket, he’d dig out a few wraps of whatever he’d scrounged from the evidence locker, or shaken down from street dealers, scatter the junk on the floor and watch with amusement as momma snatched up the wraps like a pigeon gobbling breadcrumbs. And then he’d cuff Terry Lee to the drainpipe under the sink and take momma back to the bedroom for the rest of the rent.

Chained like a dog to the drainpipe, huddled on the stained linoleum floor among the rotting food cartons and the cigarette butts, the empty beer cans and bottles, the dead roaches and the rat shit, Terry Lee would listen to Little Cyril rut his momma, or bounce her head off the bedroom walls if he was too drunk to fuck, sometimes both—dreaming up ways to way to fix that fucking pig’s wagon.

The next time Little Cyril came and cuffed him to the pipe, Terry Lee was prepared. He’d glued one of momma’s hairpins behind the drainpipe with a wad of gum. Little Cyril went out back with momma. Terry Lee started picking the lock with the hairpin. It wasn’t as easy as the cop shows on TV had led him to believe. There was a knack to it. He didn’t get it right away. It took several more visits from Little Cyril before one night, the hairpin clicked in the lock, and the steel bracelets slid almost by magic from his wrist.

When Little Cyril emerged later from the bedroom, it took him a drunken moment to register that the kid wasn’t cuffed to the drainpipe, that his gunbelt drooped impotently over the chair back, and that his pistol was no longer in the holster. He turned in time to see the boy aiming the barrel at his open fly.

Terry Lee squeezed the trigger. Little Cyril crashed to the floor, squealing like a stuck pig, clutching his crotch as what was left of his junk gushed through his hands. The boy shot him once more in the chest. Little Cyril thudded back against the pantry door and his high hog-like squeals stopped. Terry Lee wiped his prints from the gun with his tee shirt, just like he’d seen on the TV cop shows.

Momma clattered through the curtain beads behind him, stopping in her tracks when she saw him crouching over Little Cyril to remove the .22 from his ankle holster. “What—oh, baby—what have you done?”

“Take this, momma,” Terry Lee said, calmly handing her Little Cyril’s pistol.

She was still staring at the gun in her hands when Terry Lee fired the .22 and knocked her back into the bedroom. He heard the heavy thud as she crashed to the floor. He wiped his prints off the .22 and then forced the gun into the stiffening claw of Little Cyril’s hand.

Then he went and cuffed himself back to the drainpipe and waited for someone to come and find him there.

It took longer than he expected.

The flies came first.

Then the rats.

They stripped Little Cyril’s skull to the bone, until all that was left was a grinning death’s head mask, topped with ragged clumps of hair, and black-hollowed eyes that seemed to bore into Terry Lee. The rats burrowed under Little Cyril’s clothes, his shirt and pants billowing and bulging, blooming with blood as they gnawed their way inside him. Next they went after momma. Terry Lee listened to the sound of claws tearing flesh, incisors scraping bone, the frenzied squealing as they feasted and fought over scraps; watched as the vermin scuttled back from the bedroom, fur slick with blood, carrying away pieces of momma—a finger here, an ear there—like she was takeout food.

After two days, still shackled to the drainpipe, Terry Lee began to have serious doubts that anyone was ever going to come for him. The kitchen was a storm of flies, the air choked with the stench of blood and death. Little Cyril was barely recognizable as human, and momma had run away with the rats, piece by piece. The vermin turned their attention to the helpless boy. Terry Lee deeply regretted having tossed away that fucking hairpin. As the rats crept towards him, he saw his reflection in their beady black eyes, like a nightmare house of mirrors. He screamed, thrashing against the drainpipe and kicking desperately to fend them off. He was still screaming and thrashing and kicking when the cops came and found him and freed him from the cuffs, and as they carted him away in an ambulance, and for months at the orphanage he still woke screaming and thrashing and kicking from nightmares in which the cops arrived too late.

* * *

The splinter clicked in the keyhole. The cuffs snapped open. The orderly didn’t stir. Hingle freed his hand from the bracelet, and then used the splinter to work the lock on the second set of cuffs. With both hands free, he unbuckled the strap restraining his legs, slowly peeled back his sheets and then lowered his bare feet to the floor. His eyes never strayed from the sleeping orderly. He unraveled the thick surgical bandages from around his skull. His fingers brushed the stitches lacing the back of his scalp together. The wound flared angrily, but the pain only sharpened his senses. Like a cat stalking a bird, he padded across the room towards the sleeping orderly. Looming behind the man, Hingle looped the bandages around his neck like a gauze garrote, and put him to sleep forever.

There was no time to get creative on the corpse. He switched his hospital pajamas for the dead orderly’s uniform. Swiped the man’s keys and the billy club hooked to his belt. Hingle used the keys to proceed through the maze of locked gates, and the billy club to brain the fatass guard on the front desk. The guy never looked up from the titty magazine he was ogling, blood and brains splattering the centerfold bunny like clotted crimson jizz.

* * *

The escape siren didn’t start sounding until Hingle was already pounding away through the vast acreage of forest from which Pine Grove State Hospital got its name. A storm was raging, the rain lashing down, soaking him through to the bone. Lightning flashed across the night sky like yellow sutures on black velvet. His orderly whites were mud-soiled and torn where he’d clawed his way through the wilds. It had been years since he’d expended more energy than it took to zombie-walk about the hospital. His lungs burned. His legs cramped. A stitch gouged his side. And yet he barely paused for breath, energized by the storm as he plunged on through the woods.

The trees began to thin as he reached the far fringes of the forest.

The lights of a diner glittered into view. BIG BOB’S EATS, the sign said. Replete with a neon-lit likeness of Big Bob who licked his lips when the lights flashed. In the parking lot were a trucker’s Peterbilt rig, a Kawasaki motorcycle, and an old beater Volkswagen Beetle. Hingle matched the people he saw through the diner window to the vehicles. There was the trucker at a window booth, sipping a cup of coffee. A tired-looking waitress in a red check apron sat leafing through a magazine at the end of the counter. She didn’t look much like a biker. The hog had to belong to the short order cook Hingle could see through the kitchen service hatch behind her. That meant the Beetle was hers.