God Is a Bullet (7 page)

She can see that the top two folders are filled with photographs. “There are no experts. Only survivors.”

He considers this. His fingers tap at the edges of the top folder. “Yes, I can see your point. Survivors.”

Case notices a beaded Indian bracelet tautly wound around his left wrist. It seems out of place somehow. Too delicate, really. And yet …

“I believe this was a cult murder,” he says, “not a front for a kidnapping or a failed kidnapping or a robbery or any of that crap you get in the paper or on ‘Inside Edition.’ I have photos here from that night. Do you think you could deal with looking at them and telling me what you think?”

She stares at the stack coldly. She lights a cigarette. There is something absolute and terrible to this, and she wishes more than ever she hadn’t written. She is sick inside, but she won’t let on. She reaches for the folders as if she were reaching into a fire for a perfectly flamed coal.

“I’ll deal with it,” she says.

“What I’m doing now,” he says, “I have no authorization to do.”

“Oh?”

“Do you understand my position?”

She considers this in light of her own human weaknesses. “Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”

She waits to see if he will take back the folders, but he just sits there, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and lights one. He sits there, breathing deeply and studying her. There is something steady and remorseless to his face.

She pulls the folders toward her. She opens the one on top. It is filled with family photos. With snapshots of Sarah and Sam, of Gabi riding bareback out the corral gate, of Poncho caught in the act with a steak bone on the kitchen steps. Case spreads the snapshots across the table. It is a simple collage of middle-class life with all the trimmings. In one of the snapshots she notices Gabi wearing a beaded Indian bracelet similar to Bob’s.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” she says.

“Sure.”

“Was Gabi into drugs?”

“Not at all.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“Nooo.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“She hang with a druggie crowd?”

“A druggie crowd … Noooo …”

“Any of her friends into satanic shit of any kind?”

“Look at those photos. Look.” He pushes one toward Case, then another. “Does that look like the kind of girl who’s into drugs or hangs out with that kind of crowd? Come on. I know my daughter. And this is a small, family-oriented
Christian community. We don’t have much in the way of deviant behav …”

He stops.

“It’s alright,” she says. “We all came from one of those small family-oriented communities. Once. Even me.”

She opens the next folder, and there the remains of that night confront her.

Sarah stumbled, or thought she stumbled. She didn’t know that spray from a shotgun blast had ruptured one of the veins leading from her shoulder to her neck. The hallway was a black tunnel, a wild menagerie of sounds
.

She snatched at the air, trying to reach her daughter’s cries. There was smoke and another gravel of gunfire and she thought she saw a boy with a shaved head and metal spikes shaped like a cockscomb growing out of the center of his skull leap over her with a banshee yell
.

The glass wall of patio doors and the moon’s eye and the winking lights along the pool all seemed to swim and slur together in one queer molten image that swallowed her, and then another shot hit her full in the back after she had cleared the doors
.

Case takes the photo of Sarah floating in the pool and turns it facedown. She glances up at Bob. He is a wall of silent rage.

He pushes himself up on his arms and turns away. He stands by the counter and rests his hands on the ledge of the sink. He stares at the chipped face of the wall, a faded yellow.

Case begins the walk from photo to photo. The next ones are of the dog shot and stuffed down into the toilet and spittles of blood along the tub and tiles. The ones after that are of the horse lying dead in its stall, its eyes gouged out and its genitals hacked off and its groin damp and dark and shiny.

Case turns to the photo of what was once a man’s face.

Cyrus kneeled into Sam. He curled his fingers through the wire that trussed him up like a pig. He rammed him back against the wall. Cyrus took him by the cock with one hand and with the other scored a letter opener along Sam’s teeth. “You like to put your tongue where it don’t belong and get that black dick of yours hard.”

The metal blade of the opener pried apart the row of white molars. Cyrus whispered into Sam’s ear, “You’re crossing over tonight, Mr. Hard Cock. And it’ll be a slow crossing over and triple-X all the way.”

Case sits there lost within the eyes of a dead man. A heartless host of horribles comes warring up through her belly. Junkie witch revisits revenants. A silver blade for gutting, and blood token prizes. Screaming apostles bent and misshapen in moments of life burglary. All headlight bright to the memory.

The next photos show Sam lying on the autopsy table. He has been cleaned up for viewing, with his eyes fixed in the half-moon of sleep. The shots after that frame each wound, followed by a series that focus on his right arm, each one cropped up closer and closer till they’ve framed an area of veins in the forearm that look to be bruised from a syringe.

“Was Sam a drug addict?”

Bob turns. “No.”

“This is a syringe mark.”

“Is it?”

The way he asks her, she thinks he might already know the answer and is working her toward it.

“Syringe marks are a specialty of mine. Was he an addict?”

Bob doesn’t answer.

She lays the photos aside. She is being handled and she now knows it. The next stack comes upon her like a thunderbolt. A dozen or so of Sam as he was left after death.

She begins to feel the acrid taste of bile in her throat. Even
though she’s seen the dead before. Even though she’s been in on a kill, playing one of Cyrus’s catch dogs. Even with all that, the formal brooding flatness of each shot can in no way neutralize the complete, unadulterated fury behind how he had been cut and branded and dissected.

Her fingers slowly push each photo aside. Then her vision blurs. The ashes from her cigarette fall to the floor in a nervous turn.

Bob notices a slight hitch to her expression. “What?” he says.

She shakes her head in an odd, confused gesture.

“What?” he says again, coming forward.

She looks up at him as he looks down at the photo of Sam’s chest, where pinned to his heart with a stiletto and stained with blood is a playing card, or what at least looks at that distance like a playing card.

“Is there a close-up picture of that card?”

“Why?”

“Is there?”

She watched the knife pierce then halve the breastbone of that yuppie prick dentist with his white BMW and his white stucco house and his white golf shoes and white capped teeth. The blood drenched his shirt in frenetic sprays and each thrust opened a new wound and released a rush of arterial fluid out into the air with a short hiss and soon there were only a few clean untouched spots left on his golf shirt and she couldn’t help but think, as bent as it was at the time, that those spots were shaped like white orchids attached to a red gown. And as the last of his breath seeped out the wounds, Cyrus held the card up and ran it past his dimming eyes
.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“You haven’t answered mine.”

“The Judgment …”

“What is that?” he asks.

“The twentieth enigma of the Tarot. The angel signaling …”

“Judgment …” Bob leans down, crowding Case between one hand gripping the back of her chair and the other crabbed over the photo.

“Why did you stop at that?”

Her eyes tug at the photo of Sam’s arm.

Bob’s voice takes on that cold cop casualness. “Why did you stop at that?” he repeats.

Cyrus lifted the hypodermic case from his pocket. He opened it with care and removed the syringe, playing out the moment for all its texture. Shots could be heard down the hall, then Poncho’s rending yelp. Granny Boy had scrabbled up on all fours alongside Sam, who struggled against the wire that held him. Granny Boy held up Gabi’s picture for him to see and spoke of the obscenities he would play out on the girl. Cyrus filled the syringe with clear liquid from a vial and Sam cried out in hoarse gulps. Cyrus held the needle up before Sam’s eyes, and he let a little fluid squirt a taste of torture out its silvery pin
.

“Ah, poor Prometheus, without even a rock to hide behind.”

Case spiders through the autopsy photos till she finds the one of Sam’s arm. “Was it a paralytic he was injected with?”

His face draws closer to hers.

“Was it?”

He grabs her by the arms. “You’ve been asking me some pretty odd questions here.”

“Was it?”

“What do you know?”

She looks down wild-eyed at the cracked and speckled linoleum floor. He can feel her arms shivering.

“Go away,” she says.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Go away.”

“Please …”

“I can’t … Right now. No …”

“What do you know?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I could make you talk to me till you are sure.”

She pulls free and shoves herself away from the table. As she stands some of the photos spill onto the floor. Bob steps over them and grabs her again.

“Nothing? Is that it? Nothing?”

She rips free of his arm and takes another step back.

“What do you know? Tell me! What are you hiding here?”

She stares at him.

“What are you covering up?”

“I need to think,” she says. “So, just go!”

He takes a step forward and she howls an ugly, scarred call: “I told you! Get out! Let me just think awhile! Let me … let me alone to just think this out!”

Case sits on the edge of the roof’s coping. A shrunken form in the rain with her hands curled up inside her shirt. She watches Bob’s car turn over with a chugging line of muffler smoke against the cold night air and the headlights pooling out into the darkling street. They slow as they pass the front of the building. She leans back, using the dove-gray mist to cloak her as she stares down into the void of the windshield. That dark vexed face of his will haunt her now.

The rain moves in disordered streams across the black tar roof, down the rusting black drainpipes. The rain washes away nothing. It never did. The sump we all live in is too vast.

The Ferryman sat with a joint in the claw fingers of his prosthetic arm. He watched indifferently as Cyrus kicked the living shit out of Case. He sat on a flea-infested corduroy couch under a canvas tarp awning that stretched out from the slat and sideboard five-room hutch he’d built around an old trailer
.

Case tried to stand, but Cyrus kicked her in the stomach. “You want to defy me? You want to defy me?”

Lena watched from the perimeter of the awning’s shade and winced as Cyrus kicked Case again. She cried and tried to speak out but the wind blew up and swallowed her words as the tarp riffed like a noisy banner of war
.

The Ferryman’s dogs, the pack of them, howled and turned wind circles along the boundary of the fight
.

Case was on her knees. But as Cyrus shouted at her, one wobbly hand rose up in defiance and gave him the finger
.

He put his boot in her face. It hit flush on. A tooth cracked like a cheap cup and blood sprung from both nostrils
.

Case fell backward
.

“You want to try me again, bitch …”

She lay there dazed, her arms splayed at odd angles like those of a starfish
.

“I got another boot here.”

The dogs sniffed and snarled at her body as it crabbed at the sand, and when the smell of blood juked their senses they began to rise up on each other with bared teeth fighting for position
.

Among the rubble of the yard, Gutter leaned against a doorless antique Wedgwood stove. He played the white shell like a steel-drum street-corner artist, singing, “Freedom’s just another word for …”

Lena rushed over and took it to him with her nails and handfuls of flung dirt, and she spit and kicked as Gutter kept right on keepin’ on, just another baby-faced killer out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The Ferryman sat there with the joint resting neatly between those silver metal parrot fingers as Cyrus grabbed Case by the back of her leather vest and dragged her over the bleached ground and over a landslide of bottles and a low pile of castaway boards. Lena rushed up behind them. She whimpered and pleaded her lover’s cause, and with the dogs strung out behind her they were like a goddamn fuckin’ parade on their way to an execution
.

The Ferryman leaned to one side and balanced himself on his good leg so he could stand. His prosthetic leg hitched with each step as he made his way across the shade to a trunk that he kept along the wall of the house. He used it to store weapon parts. In the top drawer was a designer Bijan .38 taken as part of a settlement for a lost half-kilo of smack
.

Lena kept following behind Cyrus till he’d had enough and turned on her. He was still holding Case off the ground with one hand gripped onto the back of her vest when he caught Lena in the hip with his boot and sent her squabbling like a turkey back into the dogs
.

Then he stood Case up. He held her in place long enough for her head to clear. She tottered slightly. Her eyes began to focus up. She spit blood out of her mouth
.

He shoved her. “You want to walk …”

Her chest flared and drained
.

He shoved her again. “Walk! Go on!”

The dogs had caught up now and were close around her boots. They slopped at the damp dark where the blood had clotted in the sand
.

The Ferryman fired three fast shots into the air and a series of echoes throated back across the flats
.