Port of Sorrow (18 page)

CHAPTER
38

The first drops of rain hit Finn’s face as he leaned backwards on his parked bike, his eyes never wavering from the front door of Wells’ bungalow.

A quick reconnaissance had assured him Wells was still inside, although his female companion from the night before was nowhere to be seen. Finn wondered what it must be like to feel so coldly towards women — using and dumping them like you would a condom. Finn couldn’t imagine though he expected his ex-wife might have another opinion on the matter. Her divorce lawyer had turned his singing career into a freak show and his dream into a perversion. In the end, the judge even denied him shared custody of his daughter, stating his career and lifestyle was a corrupting influence.

There was movement and Wells came stumbling out the front door. He lifted his leg to fart, finding the noise highly amusing, before making his way to the truck and starting it up. Blue smoke burped out the tailpipe before relaxing into a noxious black stream.

Finn started his bike, pulled on his helmet and waited. The helmet had a tinted visor to hide his face.

Wells squealed his tires as he took off down the street with Finn following a safe distance behind. The street quickly became a paved secondary highway for a short distance before it dropped down to a gravel road. Wells didn’t bother to adjust his speed and the dust cloud he kicked up gave Finn an added screen to hide within.

Suddenly, a single red brake light bloomed through the dust as Wells made a sharp turn onto a dirt driveway that was hidden by tall trees and thick bush. If you didn’t know it was there, it would be easy to miss. Finn pulled into the ditch, pulled off his helmet and listened.

He could hear Wells’ truck chugging and groaning as it bounced along the unmarked driveway. It took awhile before the engine went quiet.

Leaving his bike in the ditch, partially hidden by tall grass and weeds, Finn headed down the dirt lane on foot.

Thick branches hung over the road to form a living roof that allowed barely a trickle of sunlight to reach the ground. Eerie shadows deepened ruts in the mud that showed Wells’ truck had inexplicably swerved off the makeshift road at a sharp angle to circle the 18-foot-wide stump of an ancient red cedar. The more direct path looked hardly used, its surface littered with a soft, pungent blanket of decomposing leaves. Finn stepped off the road and followed the tire tracks. They swerved sharply again once he was past the stump and Finn stayed with them.

Soon, he came to a clearing and saw a ramshackle house with a sagging roof and peeling paint. Wells’ truck was parked in front of a wooden porch. Two shadows were engaged in conversation inside the house, their heads in silhouette behind the front window.

After skirting off to the side, Finn dashed across a large vegetable garden and made his way unseen to a side window. Three air holes, covered with a thin metal screen, had been bored through its wooden frame. Finn could hear two men talking. He pressed himself close to the wall underneath the window and listened.

“I don’t think that’s so smart,” Wells said. “They’re watching Shooter’s closer now.”

A slap of skin against skin.

“Don’t question me, boy,” said another voice. It sounded familiar, yet Finn couldn’t place it to a face.

“Why you always hitting me?” Wells asked, his voice full of hurt. “I ain’t a child.”

“Then stop acting like one,” the other voice snarled. “Now are you going to do what I ask, or am I gonna give this shotgun to the police?”

Finn’s ears perked up at the mention of a shotgun and he strained to lift himself higher. He needed to see the other man’s face.

“I-I’ll do it, but when do I get the gun?” Wells asked. “It ain’t fair that you’re holding this over me, you know.”

“Once you’ve delivered my present, I’ll give you the gun.”

“Really?”

“On one condition.”

“What’s that?” Wells asked, annoyed.

“I need you to kill someone with it.”

“What! Who?”

The other man laughed. “I’ll tell you later, but trust me, you’ll like it. You can even have a little fun before you do it.”

“Oh, yeah?” Wells began to laugh as well, but with a nervous pitch.

Finn shifted position, putting all his weight on one foot as he slowly pushed himself towards the window ledge. With a resounding crack, one of the porch boards snapped beneath his foot. Finn’s leg dropped into the hole and he grunted in pain.

“What was that?” the voice shouted. “Get the fuck out there and find out what’s going on.”

Finn yanked his leg out of the splintered hole, feeling a layer of flesh scrape away beneath jagged wooden teeth. He sprinted for the road, heard Wells yelling at him, but kept his head down and his face out of view. He reached the trees just as a shotgun boom blasted through the air. Branches snapped above him and leaves rained down in clumps.

Finn ran up the road, his lungs burning from adrenaline and panic. He made sure to swerve when the tracks did, and as he left the road he heard Wells’ truck roaring to life behind him. He had to run faster. He leapt right at the tree stump and returned to the dirt road just as another shotgun boom filled the air.

It was immediately followed by a muffled scream of “Turn left, asshole, turn—”

A loud snap of tree limbs was followed by a noisy splash and a barrage of obscenities.

Finn glanced over his shoulder to see Wells’ truck nose-down in a watery pit. The paint was bubbling as though it were submerged in acid.

Finn didn’t linger.

BIG BROTHER WONDERED
how he had managed to surround himself with such incompetence.

Wells had allowed himself to be followed, and then he had dared to allow the intruder to escape. His death couldn’t come soon enough to make up for those mistakes. If he wasn’t needed for that night’s playtime and the murder of the pesky deputy, Big Brother would have killed him on the spot and dropped him like a sack of kittens into the acid pit.

The only saving grace was the intruder couldn’t have overheard enough to piece his plans together. Big Brother had always been smart enough to keep the big picture to himself. That way the incompetents only knew as much as they needed.

Walking through the mud, he growled at the rain, sensing the oncoming storm. He couldn’t wait for tonight. The stress and strain of the last few days had been building within him and he desperately needed release.

He imagined what his treat would look like, how its smooth skin would feel and how it would taste against his tongue. He felt his penis grow hard underneath his dungarees. He bit his lower lip and focused his thoughts, commanding the swelling to stop.

He didn’t want to waste himself. He could control his hunger until tonight, but then watch out.

With a hard smile, he opened the barn doors, walked past his damaged truck and climbed into the cab of a small backhoe. The engine purred to life as Big Brother lifted its heavy steel blade.

The intruder had bypassed both his traps. It was time to rearrange.

CHAPTER
39

Julia stood outside the locker room on the top floor of the station and rapped on the door with her knuckles.

No one answered.

She knocked again before making sure the hallway was empty and walking in. Rows of steel-gray lockers lined the walls, standing silent guard around a square of wooden benches. The arrangement reminded her of an Indian tribal meeting she had seen once on PBS, while the smell was definitely the same as school gym class — the boys’ side.

A large basket of blue towels sat beside the only other doorway, which led to the showers and washroom. Julia hesitated upon hearing a heavy splash of water on tile and the off-key humming of a Bruce Springsteen song from the adjoining room.

“Damn,” she whispered to herself.

Quickly, she searched for Gilles’ locker. It stood in the farthest corner from the door; the spot, which she had discovered in high school while traveling as a member of the senior softball team, most often picked by the most insecure member of the squad. She grabbed the locker’s handle and yanked. It was locked.

Crouching down to examine the simple lock, Julia saw it was scratched and dented. She glanced at the lock of the adjoining locker, only to find it was marked in a similar way.

She shook her head in frustration. Anyone could have picked the lock and nobody would be the wiser. Every locker was beat up in one fashion or another.

“Hey, what are you doing?” a voice yelled from the showers.

Julia turned to see a young deputy wrapped in a blue towel. She had been introduced to him when she first arrived and had immediately noticed his striking good looks. Now, Deputy Andreo Romero looked even more dashing as water pooled and dripped from a dimple in his chin and shimmered within two more, one in each cheek. He had dark, sensuous eyes to match thick, curly hair, and a boyish smile that pulled everything perfectly into place. She couldn’t help noticing his smooth chest and powerful legs.

“Deputy Gilles asked me to bring some things from his locker, but it’s locked,” Julia said, thinking fast.

Romero nodded. “I hear he’s hurt real bad.”

“They’ve got him trussed up like Frankenstein.”

“No kiddin’. Probably serves him right.” Romero winced and his face flushed. “Oh, sorry. He a friend of yours?”

Julia blushed. “Actually, I can’t stand him.”

Romero smiled back, his dimples deepening. He also had great teeth, she noticed.

Julia added, “Do you know how to open these things?”

“Yeah, sure.” Romero walked over, one hand clutching the towel tight around his muscled abdomen. At the locker, he crouched down, felt underneath the bottom of the door and pushed up. The door bent slightly before popping open. “I guess they figure nobody needs good locks around here. Cops are honest, right?”

Julia smiled again, thanked him, and began searching through the locker. There was nothing inside but a few biker magazines, the type where readers send in naked photographs of their girlfriends and old ladies, a rubber truncheon that looked like it had seen some action, and a box of plain condoms, colored black and labeled Midnight Stud.

She began to swing it shut, when something familiar stuck to the inside of the door caught her eye. She grabbed the door before the lock could engage. Pasted inside, surrounded by obscene playing cards was a bumper sticker that read: Elvis Loves Me. The typeface looked identical to the sticker she had spotted on the killer’s getaway vehicle.

In small type below the large black letters, the sticker read: ‘I visited Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee’. The most interesting part was the tiny copyright line that showed the sticker had only been available since last year.

Julia closed the locker, wondering how many people in Port Sorrow had ever visited Graceland.

“Did you find what you needed?” Romero asked.

“Yes, but I’ve changed my mind about delivering it,” Julia lied easily. “He asked for some magazines, but I don’t like the idea of walking around with that trash.”

“He didn’t strike me as the gentlemanly type.”

“He isn’t.”

Deputy Romero blushed, hesitated. “If you don’t mind, do you think you could leave now so I can get dressed?”

Julia felt her face flush with embarrassment, and lowering her eyes, walked out the door.

Her girlish blush vanished the instant she was back in the hallway. The bumper sticker had pushed another question to the surface, and Julia immediately made her way to the radio operator’s room.

Janine Wright looked like a Texan — tall, blonde and buxom — but she had been charming the radio waves at the station for just over a year without any trace of an accent. She was filing her nails and looking bored when Julia opened the door.

“Well, hello there,” Janine squealed, flashing a huge mouthful of teeth. “You’re that new gal who just started, aren’t you? Hope the boys aren’t giving you any trouble. They can be quite persistent. Come in, come in. What can I do for you?”

Julia’s ears had trouble catching all the words as they flew towards her at high velocity. “I need to know if Deputy Gilles called in an All Points Bulletin on a Ford truck on the night of the strip club murder.”

“Does this have to do with him landing in hospital?” Janine asked.

“No, just routine follow-up.” Julia sat down beside the Texan; two girls sharing secrets. “Between you and me, I think the sheriff has had enough of his games and is looking for something to hang him out to dry.”

“Well, it’s about time,” Janine said, rolling her eyes. “That creep has been a thorn in my backside for too long. You ever get stuck with him in a stairwell or elevator?”

Julia nodded.

“That fool always finds some way to get his hands on parts of my anatomy that I reserve for wealthier men.” Janine laughed aloud at her own joke. “You’re lucky we keep everything on computer now. If we didn’t, you would need to listen to all the back-up tapes and that could take forever.”

Janine turned to her computer, punched in the day of the murder, asked Julia for the approximate time, and added that information. A list of all incoming and outgoing calls within a two-hour period of the murder appeared on the screen. The program was nicely done. The list showed the last name of the deputy who called in, or the operator who called out, and a brief description of the call. More information was available with the click of a mouse.

Gilles name wasn’t on the list, and no one else had radioed in the APB.

Julia asked for a hard copy of the list. Once the printer spat it out, she folded it into a neat square and slipped it inside her pocket.

“Good huntin’” Janine said with a grin. “Oh, and if you do nail the creep, don’t bother inviting me to his going-away party.”

Upstairs, Julia poured herself a coffee, grabbed the phone directory and called the only travel agent in town.

Mrs. Whilma Smitty answered the phone with a cheerful, “Whilma’s wonderful world of travel. How may I help you?”

Julia explained who she was. “I need to find out who has traveled to Memphis in the last eighteen months?”

“My records are quite confidential,” Whilma said, then before Julia could react, added, “but seeing as you’re our town guardians, I’m sure it will be okay.”

Julia could hear the woman humming to herself as she shuffled through papers. Finally, she came back on the line.

“Last May, I had ten people travel to Memphis. That’s the only group recently.”

“Group?” Julia asked.

“Why, sure, don’t you know? The Sheriff’s Convention was held there last year. Practically your whole department flew down for it. I got them a very good rate, too. Everyone was very pleased.”

“I’m sure they were,” said Julia. “Thank you for your time and please make sure you hang onto that file.”

“Oh, I always do, dear. I always do.”

Julia hung up the phone. Coincidence seemed to be pointing its finger at Gilles, but there were no hard facts and too many variables to support it. Julia pulled out a sheet of paper, drew a line down the middle and wrote a headline across each column. On the left-hand side she wrote, Guilty, and on the right, Not Guilty.

Under Guilty, she wrote: Fake mustache, bumper sticker, knowledge of coroner’s report, didn’t radio in a description of the truck, used nightstick on Finn (similar wounds found on Paul), attacked Veronique.

Under Not Guilty, she wrote: Mustache could easily have been planted, no truck, nine other officers went to Memphis, no murder weapon, no proof the nightstick was used on Paul, no witnesses.

When she balanced them out, Julia came up with zero.

The only solid evidence she could hope for was the results of the bite test. But even then, Gilles could claim that he and the cook enjoyed some innocent and consenting fun and that the bite had nothing to do with his murder. Although he was such a redneck jerk that perhaps he would rather take the murder rap than admit to a gay tryst.

In anger, Julia crumpled the paper and tossed it into the garbage pail beside her desk. She needed to know more.

FINN DIDN’T SLOW
down until he was inside his hotel room with a glass of bourbon in his hand.

His lungs hurt and his face was drenched in a cold sweat. Sipping his drink, he forced his breathing to slow. His thoughts were a jumble, rushing along like a train wreck in mid-collision.

He tried to focus, to bring the relevant thoughts to the surface. Wells and the other man had something planned for tonight at the club downstairs, but what? They hadn’t said. No, wait. The second man said something about a present, but what the hell did that mean? They also discussed another murder, but whose? Wells was to pull the trigger, that’s all he had heard.

Exhausted, Finn finished his drink and closed his eyes. Slowly, the strain began to ease as his eyelids fluttered in dream, but they popped open instantly again when a heavy fist pounded against the door to his room.

“Who is it?” Finn shouted as he snatched up the baseball bat.

“It’s Marvin,” a rough voice called back. “Mr. Fearing wants to see you, pronto.”

Finn groaned and dropped the bat. He had hoped to avoid Percy for at least a few days.

“Tell him I’ll be right there.”

“You tell him,” Marvin growled back. “I ain’t your fuckin’ messenger boy.”

Finn went into the washroom to splash cold water on his face and neck. Then, with a sluggish step, he wandered down to the manager’s office.

Percy was sitting behind his large wooden desk, studying a booklet of nude Polaroid snapshots when Finn knocked once and pushed open the door.

Percy jumped to his feet, a look of disgust on his face. “What did you do to your face?” he demanded. “I paid good money to have you perform here for two weeks, and now you’re taking time off.”

“I was attacked. In your hotel,” Finn snapped back. “I could sue you for failure to provide safe accommodation, so get off my back.”

“This just isn’t good enough,” Percy protested. “I have a new batch of talent arriving in five days, but you’ll be a day behind on your contract.”

Finn could feel the hairs on his head bristle with anger. “Keep the day’s pay if that’s what’s bothering you. I’ll be glad to get out of this town as soon as I can.”

“You can leave right now. The girls did fine on the afternoon show without you.”

“I’m not ready to leave just yet, and I’ll be okay for tomorrow’s shows.”

“You misunderstand,” Percy said with a crooked smile. “I don’t want you back.”

“If you want to fire me, you have to buy out the remainder of my contract.”

Percy grinned even wider as he pulled a certified check out of his breast pocket and handed it over.

Finn took it, glanced at the numbers and stuffed it in his pocket. “Do you need me to sign anything?”

Percy pulled over Finn’s contract and pointed to a large red X.

“I can’t say it’s been nice working for you,” Finn said as he signed.

“Don’t worry, you won’t be back,” said Percy. “I want you checked out of your room within the hour.”

Finn knew he should say something, a final cutting remark, but Percy wasn’t worth even that.

QUESTIONS KEPT ROLLING
around in Julia’s head until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She glanced at the clock to see her shift was almost over and stood to leave.

At a nearby desk, Deputy Charles Olivier slipped into a weather-beaten slicker. Rain had begun slapping heavily against the windows.

Julia grabbed one of the department slickers out of the supply closet and was heading for the door when one of her questions was suddenly answered. How do you get close to a woman-hating creep? You don’t. You get close to his partner.

“Hey, Charlie,” she called. “How about buying the new gal a beer?”

Charlie blushed. “I ... I got to get home ... to the wife.”