Bad Thoughts (23 page)

      
“Do you smell something?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

      
Shannon smelled it, also. A faint odor of something rotting. It was vaguely familiar.

      
“Maybe an animal got under the engine and died,” Shannon suggested.

      
They opened the hood but didn’t find anything.

* * * * *

      
As the Saab pulled away, Charlie Winters emerged from the Dumpster. Pieces of ice and garbage fell off him as he dropped to the ground. He stood for a long moment in the twilight, his face chalk white, his skin wet and shimmering with rage.

      
At first there was nothing but violence swirling within him, but as he stood immobile, his gloved hands clenching and unclenching, he started to feel the withdrawal symptoms; a suffocating tightness filling up his chest and then his body shaking uncontrollably. The anticipation had been building up for days, and like an addict getting a taste of the junk only to then have the needle ripped from his fingers, he now needed his fix more than ever.

      
The shaking was hitting him hard, leaving him barely able to hobble out of the lot. Being careful earlier, he had parked his car eight blocks away. Those eight blocks were now an eternity. He cursed Shannon and then the rest of mankind. As he made his way through the neighborhood, walking in short, shuffling steps, the people he passed gave him a wide berth, the more perceptive ones crossing the street at the sight of him. He’d look back over his shoulder at each one of them, a dryness in his mouth, his head pounding, trying to decide if they’d do. Trying to decide how safe they would be. How easy they would be.

      
As he hobbled along he spotted her—a college girl, no more than eighteen, struggling with both groceries and the front vestibule door of a small brick apartment building. He swallowed hard as he watched her, his throat constricting. Blindly, automatically, he started to move. A patrol car pulled up next to him. The officer in it shined a flashlight in his face.

      
“Sir, I would like to talk with you.”

      
Winters turned towards the patrol car, his eyes squinting against the light. Behind him he could hear the vestibule door closing shut. The echo of it vibrated in his head.

      
“Did you hear me?” the officer repeated.

      
“I heard you,” Winters whispered in a soft, wispy, singsong voice.

      
“Do you live in Brookline?”

      
The officer holding the flashlight was middle-aged with a square, red face and a marine style crewcut. He involuntarily grimaced as he smelled Winters.

      
“Do I have to live in Brookline?” Winters asked, a soft lisp worming its way into his voice.

      
“What are you doing here?”

      
“I’m walking to my car. Is there a law against that?”

      
The officer kept the flashlight aimed at Winters’s face. “Would you like to tell me how you got so dirty?”

      
“Poor personal hygiene. Again, is that breaking any law?”

      
The flashlight moved up and down over Winters before settling back on his face. Winters was asked for identification.

      
“And why do you need that?”

      
A shadow dropped over the officer’s eyes. “I’ll only ask you once,” he said. The muscles along his jaw tightened as he reached to open the door.

      
Winters handed him the Washington State driver’s license he got after he was released from prison. The officer took it from him and told him to wait. He then rolled up the window of the patrol car and got on the police radio.

      
Winters stood in the freezing rain and waited, the water running streaks of dirt and grime down his face. After about five minutes, he knocked on the window of the patrol car. The officer inside gave him a dull stare, his hand resting on his service revolver.

      
“Excuse me, Officer,” Winters said, his soft, singsong voice straining to be pleasant. “It’s cold and I’m getting wet. And I think I’m beginning to feel ill. I would like my license back.”

      
“You just stay put,” the officer ordered.

      
“I would at least like to see your identification,” Winters said, his thin, twisted lips pulled up cheerfully. “I’d like to know who I’m going to sue for this harassment.”

      
The officer looked long and hard at Winters and then, with his eyes dulling a bit, flashed him his identification. Winters made a mental note of his name.

      
“Do you mind if I sit in the patrol car?” Winters asked.

      
“You just stand out there and wait.”

      
Ten more minutes passed before the officer rolled down the window and asked for a local address. Charlie Winters gave him the rooming house in Somerville he was staying at. It was another ten minutes before the officer opened the door of the cruiser and stepped out. He walked over to Winters until he was no more than a foot away. If he could’ve stomached it he would’ve gotten closer. Using his right hand he started to slide his handcuffs from his belt.

      
Winters spoke quickly, softly , “I’m sure at this point you know about my prison record. I’m sure you also know I’ve paid my debt to society, and that there are no outstanding warrants out for me. What you don’t know is that I spent my twenty years in prison studying law books so I’d be able to sue anyone who chooses not to observe my constitutional rights.”

      
The officer hesitated. After a long ten-count the handcuffs slipped back onto his belt. “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” he demanded.

      
Winters fingered his malformed chin. “I told you before, I’m walking to my car.”

      
“Yeah, I think you’re doing a little shopping.”

      
Winters didn’t say anything.

      
“Looking for another boy to put in your trunk?”

      
Again, Winters didn’t respond. The officer spat on the sidewalk, nearly hitting Winters’s boots. “I don’t want you ever in Brookline again,” he said.

      
“I thought this was a free country.”

      
“That’s a mistake pedophiles like you make.”

      
“I’m not a pedophile,” Winters said with both sincerity and hurt.

      
The officer held out Charlie Winters’s license, waited until Winters started to reach for it, and then dropped it. Winters reached down and picked it up off the ground.

      
“You’ve kept me out here over a half hour,” Winters said. “I’m wet and I feel ill. Could you give me a ride to my car?”

      
The officer didn’t bother answering him. He got back into his patrol car and then followed alongside Winters as he hobbled the remaining three blocks to his beat-up Subaru.

      
The officer pulled the cruiser up to a forty-five-degree angle to the Subaru, blocking it from being able to pull away. He got out and shined his flashlight through its interior.

      
“Would you mind opening the trunk?” he asked.

      
“Do you have a warrant?”

      
The officer shook his head. “If you’d like to wait, I could try and get one tomorrow morning. We could make a night out of it.”

      
The trunk was opened. As the officer bent over it and poked around, it was all Charlie Winters could do to keep from slamming the trunk on the cop’s neck. It just wouldn’t work. He’d have the cop but they’d have him. Maybe not right away, but eventually. So all he could do was stand there and take it. Blood boiled in his eyes as he plastered a thin smile across his face.

      
When the officer was done he returned to his patrol car and pulled it up and waited for Winters. He followed Winters out of Brookline and halfway through Boston before veering off. All the while Charlie Winters made plans for him. He recited the cop’s name to himself. Ed Podansky. Eddie Podansky. Eddie baby.

      
A family man, right, Eddie baby? Yeah, I’m sure you are. Wife and kiddies, right? More the merrier, Eddie, more the merrier. ’Cause we’ll all have a big surprise for you later tonight; me and your fat little wife and your fat little kids. Chips off the old block, are they? Well, their little faces will be burning in the window for you tonight. Guaranteed. The rest of them might be someplace else, but their faces, Eddie, their piece-of-shit, fat, little faces . . .

      
As he pulled up to a pay phone he was feeling better. Information didn’t have an Ed Podansky listed in Brookline but did have one in Brighton. He got the number and tried calling it. An answering machine clicked on and then the cop’s tired voice saying he couldn’t come to the phone right now but please leave a message.

      
He couldn’t come to the phone . . . The answering machine message shouldn’t have been like that. It should’ve been something about how he and his fat-assed wife couldn’t talk now because they were too busy beating their children or banging away at each other. It should’ve been something like that. Since it wasn’t, the cop had to’ve been divorced with his wife and kiddies living elsewhere. He knew they existed. Charlie Winters could feel their existence. Eventually he’d find them in his dreams, but not for tonight. For tonight it would have to be someone else.

      
He spotted her then. The someone else. A hooker, young, strung out on heroin, on the street trying to hustle some money. She looked tired and worn out and cold. All she was wearing was a short, black leather jacket and matching mini-skirt and boots. As cars rolled by, she halfheartedly tried to slow them down by flashing them some skin. There weren’t any takers. Winters sighed to himself as he put the phone back down. Hookers were cheap and easy and not all that satisfying. How can you really enjoy yourself when they’re faking the emotion and not giving a shit about what’s happening? Oh well, Winters thought sadly to himself as he headed across the street. Oh well, a body’s a body.
 
 

Chapter 24
 

      
Did he know about them?

      
Shannon could honestly answer that he didn’t. Whether he had suspicions about them was another matter. Any lawyer cross-examining him on the stand would have a hard time proving otherwise.

      
But he sort of knew about them, didn’t he? About the things Susie would tell when he’d be fading in and out around his yearly breakdowns. The way she’d claim he’d act. But, then again, Susie had stopped telling him about those things years ago, and it was easier to simply ignore, to pretend they never happened . . .

      
His suspicions went further back than Susie, though. They went back to when he was a teenager living in California. Back to maybe three years after his mom’s death. By then, he and his dad had stopped acknowledging each other’s existence. They lived in the same house, cooked food in the same kitchen, sometimes sat in the same rooms, but they never talked or even looked at each other. More specifically, they’d look through each other. Days, sometimes weeks, of that would go by; all the while a low burning rage would be filling up Shannon’s lungs, both stifling and suffocating him. When the pressure would get too great, when he could no longer breathe because of it, he’d have to get someplace alone. Then it would all come out of him; the rage and the anger and the tears. It would pour out of him like the insides from a gutted animal.

      
But did they really exist? Were they voices whispering to him or was it just noise echoing through his mind? Because there was nothing concrete, nothing substantial. Only a vague sensation of whispers dying deep in his head.

      
But he’d have a sense of what the whispers were telling him (if they were, indeed, whispers and not simply his own mind racing towards a breakdown), or more specifically, what the whispers were saying, because they never seemed directed towards him. About what a patsy he was being or if they were in his shoes they’d kick the shit out of the old man instead of the wall of his room or how unfair it all was. Especially, how unfair it all was.

      
Back then he ignored them. But he did have suspicions about them.

* * * * *

      
He had gotten back late that night. Susie eyed him somewhat suspiciously as he walked into their apartment but accepted his explanation that he’d had a late session with his therapist. For the most part it was true. He and Elaine had spent hours talking, first at a coffee shop and then at a restaurant.

      
Elaine had insisted on knowing the truth and Shannon broke down and told her all of it, the words just sort of bubbling out of him. He told her what he found when he got home the day his mother was murdered. He told her the things Herbert Winters had done to him and what his father later accused him of. When he was done he couldn’t look at her. Instead of feeling any sense of relief, all he felt was disgust.

      
“Bill, there’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.”

      
“Yeah, right.”

      
“Bill, please, look at me.”

      
He forced his eyes up to where he was looking at her. “You know,” he said, “when I picture my mom in my mind I can only see her dead. I’d give anything if I could close my eyes and see her alive.”

      
“Do you have any pictures of her?”

      
“Not a single one.” He shook his head. “The only image I’ve got of her is what’s in my head.”