Dog Eat Dog (3 page)

Through the closed door, he heard Sheila and the child enter the next room. Melissa’s bedtime. The thin wall allowed enough sound for him to visualize what was going on. The brat was saying her prayers. Jesusfuckingchrist—he hated religion. He hated God. He loved evil more than good and lying more than speaking the truth. He decided that he was going to get the credit card right now.

When he opened the bedroom door and peered out in the hall, the bedroom door to his right was ajar. They were in there. The stairs were to the left. He was careful to make no noise as he went down. She usually left her purse in the entrance hall next to the front door, but not tonight.

The kitchen. He went that way and, sure enough, it was on the sink. He opened it and removed the billfold. Eight dollars. No Chevron card. He returned the billfold to the purse and looked around. Where had she put it when she came downstairs?

He spotted her cardigan across the back of a chair. She’d been wearing the sweater when she came into his room. He picked the sweater up and felt the pocket. Sure enough, there it was.

He was feeling for the pocket when Sheila came through the door. He pulled out the credit card. “Don’t fuck with me, Sheila. I gotta get my car.”

“Don’t fuck with you. Don’t fuck with
me!
Gimme that!”

Again she extended her hand and snapped her fingers. The action itself was a slap in the face, and he reacted with rage. He lunged forward. She opened her mouth to scream a moment before his left hand slammed against the side of her head, stunning her.

His right hand darted forward, his fingers closing on her throat.

She kicked him and twisted loose. He open-handed her again, hard enough to knock her against a table, which slid across the floor. A flower vase fell off and crashed on the floor.

She came at him, flailing with both hands, eyes closed. A bony fist crashed into his mouth and drove a tooth into his lip. He could taste his salty blood. He bent over to spit it out away from his body where it wouldn’t get on his clothes.

Sheila used the respite to whirl and run for the front hall and the telephone. She was gagging. His crushing fingers had hurt her throat. Her indignation was gone and she was terrified.

In the kitchen, he jerked open a drawer and snatched a butcher knife. She heard the clatter as he dug through the drawer; then the sound of it slamming shut. The phone was a rotary. It took precious heartbeats for nine to spin back so that she then could dial one. She never got to the last digit.

“Hey, stool pigeon bitch,” he said, standing in the doorway with the severed telephone cord. The big knife was hidden down by his leg.

She dropped the phone and turned to run. Two strides and her foot slipped on a throw rug across a hardwood floor. She did a split and fell on one hand.

He leaped on her back like a predatory cat. His fingers were claws entwined in her hair, twisting her head so her throat was exposed. He raised the butcher knife and drove it down where neck meets shoulder.

It was as if he’d stabbed a wine sack. When he pulled the blade free, a fat stream of blood followed it like a geyser, spewing onto the wrist and forearm of the hand holding her hair. He tried to shift his body position to avoid the blood. He might as well have turned on a hose; now it was spraying onto the front of his pants.

Still she struggled wildly, banging her elbow into his thigh, fighting for her life even as it poured out of her.

He struck again. This time she hit the blade with her forearm, which was sliced to the bone at the wrist. She managed to deflect it from her heart, but it cut through her right breast and opened the flesh over the ribs. When the blade hit bone, his grip slipped because the handle was covered with slippery gore. His hand slid down over the blade and his fingers were cut deep. He let go of the knife and stepped back.

Her strength gave out and she went limp and fell. She spasmed, and in another minute she expired. She was lying in a virtual lake of her own arterial blood.

When Mad Dog looked down, his bare feet were in the same puddle of blood. He raised a foot. The blood had suction. Like a fly, he thought. He took a step, then another, then sat down in the chair next to the telephone stand, looking at his footprints in blood. He would have to clean them up. They had to be like fingerprints, identifiable.

As he sat looking at the horror, a great wave of drowsiness rose through him. Terror surged. Something was wrong. Had she somehow poisoned him?

“Mommy! Mommy!” The noisy stairs gave off their squeak. She was coming down. “Mommy … are you all right?”

“Stay up there,” he bellowed, jumping up.

Too late. He saw her legs; then her head as she bent over to look. He lunged at the stairs. He’d hoped that he could let Melissa sleep while he hid the body and cleaned up the mess. Then tomorrow he would put Sheila in a grave somewhere in the vast northwest forest. If questions were asked, he would brazen it out.

Now it was different. She had seen the truth. He bounded up the stairs and followed her into the bedroom. She was across the bed. “You killed my mother,” she screamed.

As he moved forward, she tried to slide away. He was too quick, grabbing her wrist with one hand and reaching for a pillow with the other.

She screamed and he dragged her closer. The screams were muffled when he put the pillow over her face. Her limbs thrashed as he forced her head down. Then he got both hands on the pillow and raised up, as if doing a push-up, crushing the pillow down over her face. Her feet beat against his legs. They might as well have belonged to a butterfly. “Die! Please die!” he begged.

It seemed to take forever, but finally the struggle ceased. By then he was also reeling, fighting unconsciousness, thinking that he was also dying. Then he realized it was the Valium he’d taken, not poison. He was bombed, not dying. The realization made him quit the struggle. The Valium had pulled him down. He closed his eyes and fell asleep on the bed beside the child’s body.

In the morning, when he awakened with a pounding headache, for a moment he thought it had all been a nightmare. Then he saw the little corpse, waxy white because the blood had all drained toward the bottom of the cadaver. The truth proved to be worse than the nightmare.

He sat up and saw his bloody footprints across the floor. He had a lot of cleanup to do. He had to hide them somewhere until he could drive into the mountains and bury them where they would never be found.

Money. He needed money, too. The credit cards. Sure. He knew the numbers on the MasterCard so he could draw fifteen hundred in cash. He could take orders too, half price of what they cost, from people on things he could buy with the card. Thank God he had a little money. It saved him from a desperate move, like a robbery. This way he could move to Sacramento and wait for Troy.

He stood up. When he moved the headache was worse. He went for aspirin; then went downstairs to look at Sheila. The pool of blood had coagulated. He couldn’t believe a body held that much blood.

Was she starting to smell? He sniffed the air. He couldn’t be sure—but he knew it would be soon. Bodies turned putrid real fast at room temperature.

2

Around the teamsters local, it was assumed that Charles “Diesel” Carson had gotten his nickname because he weighed two hundred and sixty pounds and was as relentless as a train in a brawl. Actually his name had been attained in reform school, when he played football once without a helmet and they began to call him Dieselhead. The name fit, so it stayed. It had been shortened a bit to “Diesel.” His wife called him Charles.

Nineteen years after reform school, three years after parole from San Quentin, Diesel Carson was off parole. He had a wife, Gloria, a kid named Charles, Jr., and a three-bedroom tract house in a suburb of San Francisco. He belonged to the Teamsters, and he was a favorite of the local’s officers. He did them favors such as punching out anyone who didn’t agree with how things were done. He was loyal. Who else would give an ex-con a job, even a lousy job, much less a good job.

Diesel also took contracts (not murder contracts) from Jimmy the Face and others. He’d set something on fire, or break somebody’s arm, but he refused to murder for money (punch a ticket was the operative term) because it was an automatic death penalty and he could never be sure the person who sent him could keep his mouth shut if the police had him alone in a back room somewhere, telling him he could go home if he just confirmed what the police knew already. No telling what someone would say. Murder played on some guys’ minds. They wanted to confess. Bobby Butler had confessed a prison murder two years after the fact. They took him out and gave him a life sentence. He deserved it, the damn fool. The founders of the Aryan Brotherhood had also gone crazy. Three years after Jack Mahone, one of their members, left Folsom, he walked into a police station and told the cops, “I wanna tell you about this murder that me and Tank Noah committed eight years ago.” Poor Tank went to death row over it. Diesel wasn’t afraid of prison, but the gas chamber made him nervous. It was almost silly considering how few actually went to the gas chamber, although there were plenty waiting for appeals to run out. Diesel would kill someone, but he would never trust another human being to know about it—nobody but Troy, that is. He trusted Troy all the way.

Diesel got out of the shower and put on clean underwear and fresh linen slacks. Life was great now. He was getting over the values of the Catholic orphanage, juvenile hall, reform school, and prison. Anyone who stayed out of prison for three years was doing great even if they were penniless, but to have a new car and own a house made him a monumental success. He had Hickey-Freeman suits and Johnston and Murphy shoes on his feet—and ringside seats at the fights. Next week the general secretary was arranging to pay him for featherbedding. While the truck trailers loaded with new autos rode across country on flatbed railroad cars, he was being paid a teamster’s wages, with overtime. Only the guys really favored by the union got things like that.

Jimmy the Face had provided the introduction. In return, he did favors for The Face. Tonight he was driving to Sacramento to burn up some trucks. Some fool was bidding against The Face for a trucking contract. After Diesel was through the fool would be out of business.

From a closet shelf, Diesel took out his attaché case and unlocked it. Inside were his pistols. The .45 was for serious shooting but was too heavy to carry. It made his clothes sag. The second pistol was a .22 Colt Woodsman with its muzzle threaded for the silencer resting in the niche beside it. With a hot load and a silencer, it was the perfect murder gun. It made almost no sound and the bullet stayed inside the skull instead of blowing bone and blood all over the wall. The last weapon was a snub-nose .38 Smith & Wesson five-shot revolver. Light and small enough to carry, it still had enough hitting power to do the job. It was the ideal personal protection weapon. He checked to make sure it was loaded, then clipped the holster to the inside of his waistband. It was unlikely that he would need it, but better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. No John Q. Square was going to bump into him committing a felony and make a citizen’s arrest—not unless he thrived on lead in his stomach.

He returned the attaché case to the closet and took out a tan leather jacket and Bally loafers. He’d carry them along and maybe stop in the city afterward. Too bad that he’d miss the fight card, but afterward the sharp guys would be at Charlie’s in the Mission.

He put on low-cut Reeboks and zipped up a windbreaker. In the mirror he could see no bulge. Everything was snug and he made sure nothing would fall out when he went over the fence. That had happened once and it had been embarrassing. He lingered an extra moment at the mirror. He looked pretty good, kind of handsome in a big, beefy way, the image of a big Irish cop. It made him smile. He raised his hands in a boxer’s stance, added the rocking rhythm, and snapped off a couple of jabs. He boxed smooth for his size. In the gym they said he moved like a welterweight, but the gym was not the arena. When the crowd was loud and the bell rang, he forgot all he knew about boxing. He flailed like a wild man and got his ass kicked. That ended his dream of being the great white hope and making millions in the ring. He went back to driving a rig and stealing for a living.

Now it was time to go commit a crime.

He looked around the bedroom. He had forgotten nothing. The sharpened screwdriver, claw hammer, and Clorox bottle of kerosene were in the car trunk. His gloves were in the glove compartment.

When he opened the bedroom door, he was assaulted by the bump and grind of rap music. “Turn that nigger shit off,” he yelled toward the kitchen. When there was no reply, he became furious and rushed down the hallway, muttering that it was too fuckin’ loud to hear himself think.

The kitchen was empty. Through the back window he saw Gloria hanging shirts on the clothesline. Junior sat in a stroller.

Diesel went to the back door. “What’s wrong with the fuckin’ dryer?” he asked.

“‘Fucking’ dryer. Honestly, Charles. Your son—”

“Fuck all that. He don’t know words yet.”

“He’ll learn quick.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m goin’ now. Say, how come you listen to that rap shit? I can’t believe how stupid that shit is. It’s got as much to do with music as a fart.”

She gestured in a manner that was half dismissal and half goodbye, and returned to what she was doing. As she raised up on tiptoes, it accented her legs, and when she reached, her breasts pushed against her shirt. Whatever her other flaws, she had a great body. Did he have time for a quickie? Naw. “How come you don’t use the dryer?”

“I starched your shirts the way you like them. The dryer pulls the starch out.”

“That’s reasonable. I’m outta here, baby.”

“When’ll you be back?”

“Tonight sometime.”

“Be careful.”

“I’m always careful, baby.”

“Give me a call if you’re later than midnight.”

“That I’ll do,” he said, adding to himself: If I remember.