The Finder: A Novel (22 page)

The girl was just sitting there in the dark. He heard her slide open the drawer.

"Guns!" she whispered aloud.

Then the door to the kitchen opened. Ray heard the heavy footsteps through the walls.

"Hey, Sharon?" came a man's low voice.

"Here!" she whispered loudly. "In here!"

The steps approached the doorway. "He's really out?"

"Think so."

"Get in the car."

"Let me put on my shoes."

"Did you let him fuck you?"

"No."

"I think you did."

"No way, he's disgusting."

"You touched his dick, Sharon."

"He
made
me. I was doing it for
you."

"Blow job?"

"No, I swear."

"You're fucking lying."

"No, no—"

"You just better get in the car."

She left. Ray could hear the unconscious man breathing loudly. He thought he smelled something like cinnamon.

"Fucking douche bag."

"Come on," came the girl's voice down the hall, "what are you doing? There are guns in the drawer, by the way, mister jealous motherfucker."

"You touch them?"

"No."

"Get in the car!"

She left. Ray could hear the back door open and close. The lights flicked on. A line of light ran between the closet doors now. He heard the drawer slide open, the clatter of the pistols being taken, followed by the boxes of ammo.

"Hey, hey, fuckwad," came the voice. "Look at you, Richie, try to fuck my girl. Plus you fucked up, which means now you're going to fuck
me
up."

There came the lowest groan in the bed, as if Richie had heard this accusation and was trying to respond.

An ominous silence followed. Then came a whipping crack.

Richie gagged out a delirious, inchoate howl. The golf club, thought Ray. Another crack, this time wetter, more awful.

"Fucking made her touch your—!" Then came two, three, four, six, eight blows, in rapid and savage progression, each making the same wet cracking noise, the assailant breathing quickly, panting in a frenzy, grunting at the effort, the splatting blows ending after twenty seconds at most, whatever ability to respond that Richie might possess now obliterated.

"Ugh, fuckin' . . . fucked
up
," breathed the voice. "I fucking
told
you, Richie. Somebody calls me, then some guy is looking for you! You blew it, you fucked up!"

No answer came back.

There seemed to be a deliberative pause—as if the assailant was weighing what he wanted to do next versus what he needed to do. Ray heard him shift his weight from one foot to the next, lining up the swing. Then the blows came, another savage series, wet-wet-wet, so fast Ray knew the club was being whipped up as fast as it was whipped down, ten-fifteen-twenty blows or more, the assailant grunting in spasmodic exaltation, taking pleasure again and again—and then, just as abruptly, the wet whipping sound stopped, the club flung heavily against the wall.

Footsteps disappeared through the doorway, through the kitchen, and out the door. Ray heard a car start up and disappear.

Silence now.

He smelled blood.

Just wait another minute, he told himself.
Be sure.
Finally he pushed open the closet door and stumbled out to the floor, legs numb, pulling golf balls and shoes with him. On the bed lay Richie, his face a bloody mass—no nose, no cheeks, a hole that had been a mouth. His smooth chin had been driven into his windpipe, and in general the oblong spherical shape of the head had been flattened. Nearly every blow had hit Richie's face, cratering his skull. The few errant swings had glanced off the wet mass onto the pillow, leaving golf-club imprints. For the brief period that Richie's brain had continued to deliver information to the heart, the left ventricle had kept pumping blood up through the aorta and out the crushed face, leaving Richie's head in a pool that now faithfully followed every wrinkled depression in the bedspread, soaking downward as it went. After the heart stopped beating, lividity occurred—the seepage of fluids from the highest part of the body to the lowest, which meant in this case that blood and other fluids would continue to leak from Richie's ruined head for some time to come. Indeed, Richie's crushed forehead had now paled to a purplish white, the flesh drained. His popped eyeballs seeped blind tears of viscous matter.

Richie had never had a chance, his shirtless body still sprawled in the position of deep sleep, hands out, shoes off, his boxer shorts askew, belly soft, a tattooed lightning bolt adorning his hip bone. Next to him, the bedside table drawer had been yanked open. On the floor lay the bloody golf club, bent in the middle now. Blood had sprayed the walls and ceiling. The police would have no difficulty re-creating what had happened.

The police. The Suffolk County detectives knew what they were doing, would be all over the place sooner or later. No doubt Richie's killer and the girl had left all sorts of indicators of their presence—her prints on the edge of the glass, etc., but maybe there was an explanation for that; they visited Richie earlier in the evening.
It was Ray who was the anomaly in the life of Richie.
So now he took the trouble to find the Clorox in the basement, wet a rag with it, and wipe every surface he had touched. Clorox destroyed DNA. Nerve-racking as hell; he had to remember every one of his steps in the house. He felt a thin trickle of
sweat begin under his arms. Of course he'd left skin cells and hair fibers around, especially in the closet. The cops would swipe hundreds of different surfaces. His DNA was on file, too, somewhere. The department took it in case they needed to identify your remains.

He forced himself to find a vacuum cleaner and vacuumed out the closet, every golf ball and shoe, and then threw them in again. The problem was that flecks and spots of blood were all over the floor and he was walking in them. Blood on my shoes, soaking into the minute scratches in the soles, he thought, I have to get rid of them. Didn't help to have the dead Richie behind him, watching, sort of. He flicked off the bedroom light, in case a neighbor looked in and saw the faceless body on the bed. He pulled the bag out of the machine, then dropped it, the Clorox, and the rag into a trash bag and took it with him, right through the basement again and out the ground doors.

He let the door close quietly, aware that he had not turned out any other lights in the house or checked to see if the front door was locked. Was that good? He wasn't sure. But the fact that he had broken into the basement doors disturbed him. It suggested the entry point of Richie's murderer. The police would examine the minute edges of the place where the metal was cut and see no weathering, that it was fresh. Ray had accidentally created a false clue—one that could point at him. He knew that the paint on the carbide blade would match the paint of the metal ground doors. Another thing to get rid of, he told himself. Shoes and saw blade. Also get rid of the saw itself; the matching paint dust would have been sucked into the motor; they'd find that in five minutes, match it using gas chromatograph tests. Wait! he thought. There would be matching paint dust on his clothes, too. Shoes, bag, saw, all clothes, he told himself, get rid of them.

He retreated into the woods again, half expecting police cars to pull up any minute. The night breathed a soft warm breeze. He slapped at a mosquito. A car passed. He had not seen Richie's killer. Maybe I should have jumped out of the closet and stopped him, thought Ray. But the guy was swinging a golf club with murder in his heart. Ray wasn't quite satisfied at this line of rationalization. He would've had a moment of
surprise. It was at least possible he could have saved Richie. But then what? He'd have to have fought the guy. He thought he remembered the guy taking guns out of a drawer, the sound of it. Yes, the girl told the guy about the guns and opening the drawer was the first thing he did. Were the guns loaded? If so, Ray could have jumped out of the closet and the guy could have wheeled and shot him in the face.

Maybe it was better he'd stayed in the closet.

When he reached his truck, he took off his boots so as not to wipe blood on the pedals and floor mat. I'm being careful, Ray thought, but something is bugging me, something I missed. He put the shoes and the saw in the big plastic bag, along with his coat, and tied it off, then dropped it in the back of his truck. He could dump the bag here but preferred to do so elsewhere, maybe separate the items first.

I'm thinking like a criminal, Ray realized. He sat in his truck and forced himself to take long breaths. I might have stopped it, he thought. He couldn't tell the police much about the murderer. I don't know his name, I never saw his face. But the girl was called Sharon. They could find Sharon and then the murderer. But Sharon could just say she was elsewhere the whole night, with the murderer. Ray was the one without the alibi. Even if the cops believed him, he would have to tell them everything, back to the Chinese guys and then crawling in the pipes. They'd probably arrest him, too, since he'd then also be connected to the deaths of the two Mexican girls. The stranger your story, the more likely the police would put the cuffs on, get the wacko off the street. He wondered whether he should tell his father about Richie. The advantage would be that his father would understand the situation better, how dangerous it was. But it might make him worry. It also might make him want to kick the whole thing over to his old NYPD colleagues and be done with it. And then they'd arrest Ray, no matter who his father was.

No, no, he thought, I can't tell Dad about this. The man can't be lying in his deathbed thinking that his son is a murder suspect.

He started the truck and turned it around on the dark road, unable to resist driving by the house on the way to the highway. It had been,
what, an hour or more since he'd crawled out of the closet? He approached the house—not sure why he wasn't seeing it.

Then he did see it. The lights were out, every one.

Ray pushed the accelerator in fear, sped past.
The lights.
He'd left all the lights on and now they were
out.
But wait—he'd turned off one light, in the bedroom. If it was the killer who had returned to the house to turn off the lights, had he noticed this? Or smelled the Clorox? Seen the blood smears on the rug? Maybe even seen the cut basement ground door?

I know about him, Ray realized, but now he knows about me.

He was exhausted from his drive back to the city and he was anxious, too—unusual for him. Seeing Richie dead like that had shaken him up, loosened up some old stuff he'd thought he'd carefully tied back together a while ago. The old loose fucked-up stuff in his head. The
bad
stuff. He needed to soften it fast, blur it out. And to do that he wanted something more than getting quietly buzzed on a few beers, something deeper. He'd smoked opium a few times in Pakistan, never got hooked. At midnight, he remembered, Gloria cleaned the Dilaudid machine.

So he waited, sitting next to his father, who was asleep. She went into the kitchen to prepare and, in that moment, Ray quickly pulled out the shunt that was inserted into the intravenous line that went to his father's arm and slipped it into a needle line he'd stolen from the nurse's box of supplies and put into his own wrist. Then he punched the drug delivery button. The machine gave him the last discretionary dose of the twenty-four-hour period. The machine kept track of how many times the patient pushed the button, and if the nurse had been checking, she might notice.

He felt a warm pressure go into his arm, the dose delivered. Then he pulled out the shunt and slipped it back into his father's line. There was no danger of contamination for him or his father because the shunt itself never touched anything other than sterile plastic. He gently pulled the line from his own arm and slipped it into his back pocket.
Gloria returned, gave him a second look, unplugged the machine, disconnected it from the line going into Ray's father, and took the machine to the kitchen.

Ray dropped heavily into the deep chair next to the bed. A faraway thought came to him that his father had built up a tolerance over the weeks he'd been taking Dilaudid, whereas Ray had no such preparation . . . but so what? The thing was hitting him now . . . a warm wash that dropped him into collapsing pools of stupefying pleasure . . .

What phantasms dance in a man's head while clutched in a morphine dream? Does he witness what never happened? Or does he redream what he otherwise wishes he'd forget? Does the mind billow florid sweetness or release its darkest horror? Do the most recent images (Richie, dead before him) and thoughts (I could have saved him) and smells (blood) find their antecedents within his memory? Does one nightmare recall another? It must be possible . . . Do the sounds come back . . . the roaring above them as they searched the subbasement for anyone trapped behind fire doors? Wickham in front, Ray shining his flashlight along the dark corridors, all electricity turned off, walking in their heavy boots and unbuckled bunker coats and helmets in the sub-basement looking for people trapped behind jammed fire doors . . . those sounds of footsteps always in his mind, the last footsteps before everything, before Wickham had stopped, cocked his head . . .

Hear that?

No. Wait. I do.

A roaring had begun.