PIKE (11 page)

He wakes and smokes a cigarette in bed, thinking. Then he checks on Bogie. Still alive. Curled up in the bathtub in his boxers, his gnarled body covered with sweat, his skin pale and twitching. He looks to have been tortured, more than once. His sparrow torso is crossed with scars, and one of his elbows is knobbed, deformed, and there’s a mottled burn scar in the shape of the letter T on his left shoulder blade, splayed and crooked like the brand was put down while the kid was fighting like hell to keep it off. And he snores with the rattling whistle that comes of a nose that’s been set badly. And, spreading across the kid’s chest, there’s a bruise. Purple-black with the force of Pike’s shove.

Pike flips on the bathroom fan, lights a cigarette, staring down at it. He’s had bruises like that. They ache like a fresh blow with every breath and they don’t heal for a long time. They feel like they’re rotting back through the breastbone, into the internal organs. He thinks hard about smothering the little shit in his sleep. He sets his cigarette on the back of the toilet and walks to his bed. He strips the blanket off

and palms a pillow, returns to the bathroom. He lifts Bogie’s greasy head gently and slides the pillow under it and covers him with the blanket. Then he sits down on the toilet, looking at him.

P
ike didn’t make it far from Nanticonte before his money ran out. East St. Louis, an alley outside a bar, holding a tire iron. The victim got lucky, had his wallet out before Pike could get a swing off. And it was full of bills, over two hundred dollars. It was a payday that took Pike to Kansas City, where he got a job bouncing at a blues bar. Six days in, he was dealing heroin for the owner, a midget named Chuckie. She ran all the biker smack in town, funneling it from the Hell’s Angels straight into the colored bars. There was an irony there that neither Chuckie nor the Angels misunderstood.

Pike was a good dealer. He was better at breaking heads. Chuckie started giving him muscle work. Pressing out the competition, clearing up debts, backing her up with the Angels. He was good at it. Then Chuckie started to notice smack missing. She hired three bikers to take it out of him, in her bar after closing. None of them left walking, and she ended up in a hospital that she never came out of, her face beat with a pair of brass-knuckles until her skin was running free with her bones.

Then Denver. He dealt the smack and bought coke to kick the smack with, planning to sell the surplus. It was a hell of a plan, but he ran out of surplus. So he got a room above a pool hall on Larimer Street, made himself available for work. All it took to know who he was you could get by looking at him, and he scored gigs using all the same talents he’d honed in Kansas City. His face was a cocaine death’s head, he was on fire with knowing exactly who he was.

This was one of those nights. Dancing with one of the local girls in a honkytonk on Colfax. Dancing close. She was young, too young, all cowtown muscle and lean hunger, and she decided to pretend tomind his dancing. A cowboy stepped between them, took the girl by the arm. He was slim, his skin clear and tan. There was a thin sheen of perspiration on his upper lip, as if he knew what would come next. Pike shoved the girl away without speaking. She stumbled, recovered her feet. “Nothing’s happening,” she said to the cowboy. “We’re just dancing.”

The boy said nothing. His eyes were cavernous with pain. Pike grinned at him. The boy slipped his knife out of his pocket before Pike even saw his hand move, the thin blade slivering through the air, crossing his stomach. Those nights were bad. Pike didn’t feel much on any of them. He grabbed the boy’s knife hand, cranked the wrist until he heard it crunch. Then slipped his hand into his brass knuckles and hammered the boy’s oval face until his legs crumbled like sandstone. Then yanked him up by his broken wrist, feeling the play in his separated bones. Pike worked on his teeth, smashing them into roughs, jerking the boy into his fist until his broken wrist had separated entirely.

Then Pike stopped. The bar was a vacuum of light and sound, sucked somewhere out into the street, the locals gaping, their dark eyes focused on him like sinkholes into their brains. The girl had collapsed into a crouch. She was sobbing slowly to herself, saying something too low for him to pick up the meaning. Pike dropped the boy’s hand, let him crumple on the floor. Broken tooth fragments oozed out of his mouth, his mangled hand flopped meaninglessly at his side.

Then Pike saw they weren’t looking at the boy. They were looking at him. His stomach was a plastic yellow and his intestines were poking out, glistening a light powder blue in the bar light. Pike stared stupidly and tried to poke the slippery mass back into his stomach cavity. He doesn’t remember any reaction to it at all. Just the blank that was his younger self.

W
hen the sun rises, he walks back into the bedroom and picks up the phone. Jack doesn’t even wait for a hello. “I’m gonna need more out of you,” he says. “Whatever you’re doing up there, I need to know what it is.”

“Or?”

“Or you get nothing from me. Or I call every officer I know in the Cincinnati Police Department and tell them you’re considering doing harm to one of their own.”

Pike walks the phone to the window, looks down. A huddle of three old men, blowing into their hands, stamping their feet, waiting for the bar next door to open its doors. “The other night Krieger cornered Wendy,” he says. “Said he had business with her of some kind. I’m looking to figure out what kind.”

There’s the sound of Jack drawing off his cigarette. Then exhaling. “Krieger’s partner is Christopher Vollmann,” he says finally. “He’s the cop who found Sarah’s body. It could be Krieger recognized Wendy from her mother’s murder.”

Below, the bar opens and all three old men turn in unison, their faces like looking-glasses into their appetites. A wave of nostalgia for those kind of appetites washes over Pike. “Could be. You get an address for Vollmann?”

“Leave it. I’ve talked to every cop I know since you called me last night and the only agreement I’ve got out of them is you don’t fuck with Krieger. Two of them hung up on me for mentioning his name in the form of a question.”

Pike hangs up the phone.

Rory’s out of bed and on the floor, doing pushups in his boxers,his broad back streaked with morning sunlight, breaking with muscle like a field of dense stone breaking through the soil. He turns his head to Pike. “What was that?”

Pike cleans his glasses on the bed sheet. “Krieger’s partner is the cop that found my daughter’s body.”

Rory stops at the top of a pushup and swings to his feet. “Whoa.”

Pike pulls on his boots. “You baby-sit the junky. I’m gonna talk to him.”

“No way.” Rory grabs his shirt off the bed. “I should be with you.”

Pike looks at him. He’s a brave kid, no matter his reasons for being here. “Not this time,” Pike says.

T
here’s one Christopher Vollmann listed in the clerk’s phonebook. In Westwood, a working class neighborhood on the West side of Cincinnati. Pike finds it easy, a dirty white colonial with small patch of a snow-swept dead grass for a yard, surrounded by a chain link fence. He hefts the gate open and dodges dogshit up the walk to the dirty white porch. A graying woman with the furrowed brow of a Chihuahua answers the door. “Yes?” Her hands are spattered with pottery clay, she wipes them clean on her smock.

“Mrs. Christopher Vollmann?”

She parks her hands on her hips. “I’m his mother. If you’re a reporter, turn around and take a long walk towards whatever hell you believe in.”

“I’m a friend of a friend.”

“Right now my son doesn’t have any friends.”

“Who is it, please?” A woman appears in the entrance hall from one of the side doors. A young full-mouthed brunette, holding an infant in a pink sleeper.

“Don’t worry yourself about it, Marie,” Vollmann’s mother says. “He was just leaving.”

Pike moves past her. “You Christopher’s wife?”

Vollmann’s mother answers for her. “They’re separated. This is my house. You don’t step around me to get inside.”

“I am his wife,” Marie says. Her accent is thick French. “Do you know Christopher?”

“No. But I think my daughter did.”

“I’m calling the police.” Vollmann’s mother turns briskly to a wallmounted phone. “You will leave my house.”

“My daughter was a hooker.” Pike eyes Vollmann’s mother. “I don’t know how your son knew her, but I’ll bet you’d rather your son’s buddies weren’t the ones to figure it out.”

“A hooker? A prostitute?” Marie’s voice trembles a little, then steadies. “He was with her?”

“That’s the easiest answer.”

“Shut up, Marie,” Vollmann’s mother says. “My son’s never needed to fuck whores. At least not until you.”

Marie’s eyes widen like she’s been smacked across the face with a wire hanger. The infant turns her face into her mother’s shoulder and begins to whimper. “Excuse me,” Marie says. “I must feed her now.” As she exits the hallway, Pike catches a glimpse of finger-width bruises on her neck.

Vollmann’s mother stares after her with a hatred that runs all the way down into her, like a bucket into a very deep well. Pike lights a cigarette and flips his lighter shut with a loud clink. Her face snaps towards him. “What do you want?”

“My daughter’s dead and your son found the body. I want to know how he knew her.”

“My son has never fucked whores.”

“You said that. You can call the police and see how it plays out. Or you can show me where he is and I’ll be on my way.”

Her face twitches. “Follow me,” she says, pivoting sharply on her heel. She leads Pike to a flight of stairs, up it, and down a hallway to another short flight of stairs that leads up to a trapdoor. She bangs on the trap door. “It ain’t locked,” a man’s voice calls.

She shoves the trap door open.

Vollmann stands in front of a full-length mirror propped up against the wall. He’s a crew cut blonde kid with a weightlifter’s body, holding a S&W .44 in his right hand, a police issue shotgun leaning on a weight bench next to him. He rolls his head on his neck and closes his eyes, breathes, then jerks the revolver up at his own face in the mirror. He opens his eyes and takes stock of his sight alignment. Then reholsters the gun in his shoulder holster. “What do you want, Mom?”

“I have someone who wants to talk to you.”

“So? What the fuck’s he want?”

“Answers,” Pike says.

Vollmann glances over at him. “Well. Go on ahead and say your piece, seeing how you’re standing there.”

“Alone.”

He shrugs. “You heard him. Get out of here, Mom.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“I said get out of my room, Mom,” Vollmann says between clenched teeth. He whips the gun out of his holster and centers the sights on his face. He flexes his gun hand, admiring the muscles as they play down his arm. “Now.”

“This is my house.”

“This is my room.”

Pike takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes. “Mrs. Vollmann, I won’t talk to him in front of you and I won’t leave until I’ve talked to him.” He replaces his glasses. “You can leave, or we can wait.”

She stamps her foot in frustration, her eyes flicking between Pike and Vollmann, brimming with strange rage. Then she spins furiously and exits, slamming the trap door down behind her.

“Jesus.” Vollmann twists his T-shirt on the barrel of the .44 and holds it up to the light. “She acts like I’m a fucking kid.” He reholsters the gun. “What do you want?”

“You found Sarah Pike’s body?”

“I did.” Vollmann picks a beer can out of a stack of cans on the floor and upends it over his mouth. His Adam’s apple jerks like a piston for a minute, then he wipes his mouth. “The bitch had been dead for two days and the junkies were using her as a cum dump. We had to scatter four of the filthy cocksuckers off her just to ID the body. I never smelled anything like it.” He crunches the can in his fist, tosses it on the floor. “What the fuck’s it to you?”

“I’m her father.”

He shrugs. “Then you know everything about her there is to know. She was a junky. It ain’t like any other end was likely.”

Pike takes a step closer to Vollmann. “I want to know how you knew her.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“That’s the one answer I’m not gonna believe.”

“Well, fuck you, then.” Vollmann fumbles in the stack of cans for another beer. “Believe whatever you want.”

“How’d you find her?”

“We were talking to a bum we know. He told us there was a dead girl. We investigated.”

“We? You and Krieger?”

Vollmann’s eyes are like pissholes in a snowbank. “Fuck you.”

“Krieger’s dirty,” Pike presses. “Krieger’s your partner. How’d you know her?”

Vollmann drops his beer and grabs at his shotgun, all in one short clean motion like he’s spent hours practicing it. Doesn’t matter, Pike jerks the shotgun out of his hands by the barrel, slams the butt into his nose. Vollmann yelps like a puppy, blood cascades into his cupped hands. “I think you broke it,” he whines.

“It won’t kill you.”

“Fuck you. I’m a cop.”

“You ain’t a cop. You’re a dumb fucking thug who wandered into a job with a pension.” Pike reverses the shotgun and holds it in the crook of his arm, his finger on the trigger guard. “Hand me the .44, by the barrel.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Vollmann looks at him, shaking his bloody head in wonderment. “I’m still a cop to the cops, no matter what they think I did. All I have to do is say your name over the telephone and I’ll turn your whole world into shit.”

“I’ll take that chance.” Pike ratchets the shotgun’s slide back far enough to check the chamber, loaded. He walks to the trap door and slides the dead bolt closed. “How’d you know my daughter?” he asks, returning.

“Fuck you.”

Pike flips the shotgun in his hands, slams the butt into Vollmann’s temple. Vollmann lets out a thin shriek, pukes beer all over himself. Vollmann’s mother tries to open the trap door. She bangs on it.