Malice (19 page)

He looked more closely and felt his stomach lurch. It was blood and bits of chipped bone and brain matter: an explosion from the back of McMurphy’s shattered head. The man beside him in the picture, the reverend, was roaring with gales of laughter.

A deep chill pulsed through Alex’s body. He could hear the laughter cackling inside his head like static. He clapped his eyes shut and put his hands up to his ears and counted to three, wishing it would all just go away. When he opened them—hesitantly at first, like a man expecting to open his eyes and find that the world around him had been flattened to the size of a crepe—he found that the picture had gone back to normal; two men standing before Millingham High, back to their old smiling selves. But what did it all mean? Was all this the confusion of a tired mind? He decided it wasn’t. He had been lucid enough to question Lysander and deal with…what had been left of Derek. So that wasn’t it. But for the life of him, he couldn’t find a motive connecting Small to any of the murders.

Alex swallowed hard and his throat clicked.

From a low round table near the office door an eerie-looking bust of Jesus was watching him; the expression on its face sadly compassionate and yet pleading. Part of the bust’s flowing mane was chipped away.

Dorothy’s words came back to him with violent force:

”…
an object, maybe five to ten pounds…Anything from the edge of a baseball bat…to a marble statuette
.”

A ready-made weapon within arm’s reach. Taken from Hume’s house after the murder and maybe kept by the killer as a sick token of a job well done. Alex grabbed the bust in his two hands. It wasn’t enormous, but certainly large enough to kill a man if it struck him with sufficient force. He shoved it down the front of his pants, pulling his loose sweater over the bulge to conceal it. At that moment a voice nearly made him wet himself.

“Can I help you, Deputy?” Reverend Small said from the doorway. He was struggling to pull his bathrobe tight with his other hand. Gone was the warm, charming smile.

Sheriff Crow was scowling at him from behind the reverend, just visible over the reverend’s thin shoulder.

“I went to find the washroom and must’ve strayed a little.”

The reverend remained stoic.

Sheriff Crow laid a hand on the reverend’s shoulder, and Alex wondered if he meant to arrest the man. But instead he said: “I think we’ve taken up enough of your time tonight. Again please accept our sincere apology for waking you.”

The reverend stared at Alex, and Alex felt his face flush with guilt. The man’s gaze was shattering, like having a thousand suns suddenly turned toward you. He couldn’t help but look away, and he hated himself for letting some scrawny little man do that to him.

The reverend saw them to the door. Alex and Steve went to their respective cars. All the lights in the house went out. But even so Alex was sure he could see a shadow staring out at them. He slid into his cruiser feeling a chill that was not just from the coldness outside. He removed the bust from under his belt, threw it on the passenger seat and turned the ignition. The car hummed to life and he turned on the heat. A cold gust of air blew into his face. Slowly it warmed. He backed his cruiser out of the driveway and waited for the sheriff to do the same.

Alex glanced over at the bust.

Jesus’ head was tilted to the side, looking up through the car window toward the sky, dark and starless. An inscription on the base of the bust read: Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.

Alex lifted his radio and brought it to his lips.

“Sheriff, I know it’s late, but there’s something I gotta do.”

The sheriff’s car pulled into line with his own. “The next time you go playing detective, be a little quicker about it.” His voice was strained. “That man in there’s one of the most influential, law-abiding citizens in town. We can’t go treatin’ him like a two-bit thug.”

Several replies came to mind, but Alex said none of them.

“Roger that, Chief,” he answered instead. “See you in the morning.”

He drove away, thinking about the autopsy report he’d found on James McMurphy not long ago. It had disappeared for a short time from the morgue, but had turned up eventually, filed away in Dorothy’s new storage facility. It was beginning to look like this sonofabitch had just taken his fourth victim tonight.

***

The Hume house was an icebox. Mrs. Hume, stashed temporarily in a motel on the outskirts of town, had insisted they turn off the furnace to save on her heating bill. At the time, Alex had gone to the fuse box uncertain which switch would do the job. Ten minutes later and severely ill-tempered, he had opted to simply shut the whole house down.

Now he was standing before that same fuse box, trying to read the labels beside each switch through the yellow glow of a flashlight, looking like an overweight man comparing low fat yogurts.

A part of him was grateful the box was on the main floor and not in the basement. That unsettling feeling he’d gotten in the reverend’s office still hadn’t faded away entirely, and even more unwelcome was the prospect of having to paw his way around a musty cellar. If the living room was anything like the basement, then he would gladly pass. He swung the beam of light before him, illuminating the kitchen and found there a disturbing tableau of normality. A tea kettle sat askew on the stove element, as though deposited there only moments before. On the counter, a teapot still donned its cozy; a brown smiling cat, its tail curled around its haunches like an Egyptian statuette. Shining the flashlight ahead of him, he went through the kitchen door and into the living room. He flicked the light around, trying to ignore Hume’s collection of voodoo shit. A patch of sweat was gathering on his stomach, in particular around the bust of Jesus wedged against his pubic bone.

He stopped suddenly, and his head perked up. The odor of Hume’s decomposing body had vanished, but something else had taken its place and it wasn’t the smell of rotting antique furniture. This was something entirely new and it hadn’t been there before.

You’re tired. The quicker you do this, the quicker you can go home
.

He brought the light up to illuminate the fireplace mantle and saw the shrunken heads with their sewn eyes that still seemed to be peering out at him. So where had he seen that missing piece again? There was so much creepy shit on every table, this would take longer than he thought. Every bloody inch was spoken for…except…

On a cherry wood table against the far wall, Alex spotted a vacant space between two medieval depictions of hell.

He angled Jesus out from under his belt buckle and crossed the room. A circular, almost dustless depression was visible on the tabletop where something had been before. Even measuring visually, the dimensions appeared to match. He angled himself so he could place the statuette, feeling a little like Indiana Jones preparing to swap the golden idol for that bag of fine sand.

Alex’s head snapped up.

That smell was back. It had skated right past him before. Cheap aftershave was what it smelled like, and he remembered now where he’d encountered it before. He turned quickly and flickered the beam of light across the room.

The beam cast long, twisted shadows that scurried from the light. Alex’s pulse quickened. That sense of being watched was almost unbearable now.

He’s here! He’s in the house with you!

But Alex turned his back, trying to smother the rising panic.

There was no way a seventy-year-old man could have gotten here before he did. He had broken nearly every speed limit out there. Nevertheless, a scream was on the verge of slipping free. He swallowed it down with a strained, dry gulp. He was imagining things again, the way he had imagined Diane Crow’s bloated body in the bath and that picture on the wall, moving on its own. In spite of the apparent nonsense of it all, his hand clutched the flashlight tightly.

He caught threads of cheap aftershave again, stronger now than before. He tried to ignore it. The same way he was trying to ignore the feeling of ghostly hands reaching from out of the darkness, clawing at the back of his neck.

He slowly lowered the bust onto the table—fighting the sickening urge to glance behind him. It had to be exact, precise.

Jesus slid into place.

The fit was perfect.

Well I’ll be damned
…

Course, lots of things could fit there, couldn’t they? Besides, he had never heard of a jury convicting anyone on the basis of a clean spot on a table.

But this wasn’t for the jury, was it? No, this was just for him—the only jury that mattered. He stuffed the bust back under his belt and turned just in time to see the gleaming edge of a hatchet cutting through the air. He screamed and the crotch of his trousers became a warm glow. The glow trickled down his leg and onto the floor.

The flashlight fell from his hand and smashed onto the floor, doing a full three-sixty. For a moment, it flickered on and off, painting the wall with ghastly shadows. Then the light went out. Alex raised his hands defensively in the dark, waiting for the strike that he knew was coming, but never did. He waited and then slowly opened his eyes, allowing the darkness to creep in. He groped on the floor desperately for the light, and when he snapped it back on, the room was empty.

There was no hatchet. Just a man in a dark house scaring the shit out of himself. “Next time,” he whispered to the empty room, if there ever would be a next time, “I’ll turn the power back on first—every light in the goddamned house.”

Alex looked down at the bust of Jesus again. The smell of aftershave was so far gone, it might never have been there in the first place. He held the flashlight up to his temple and shook his head.

I’ll be damned
, he whispered again.

“I don’t want us to be enemies anymore,” Glenn was saying as they drove home in the dark. Lysander’s head, pounding like something out of a Stomp concert, was leaning against the window. He had no intention of talking to his father. That had already been decided. Until a moment ago, the only question unanswered was how long he was required to fake sleep before his father left him alone.

But this was new, wasn’t it? Enemies? No, he had never heard that one before. Lysander remained quiet, listening.

“Your mother and I…we feel that…well, I’m just gonna come out and say it. We feel you’re drifting away, son. There was a time when you and me were pals and …” His voice trailed off. “And I guess I’m asking how we might fix things.” Lysander could see Glenn’s fingers tapping nervously against the seam of his faded Levi’s.

“I don’t think you’re ready to have me back,” Lysander said. The headlights from a passing car made shadows rush across the ceiling.

Lysander could feel a momentary flash of anger rise up in his father. He hadn’t meant to be condescending. It was the plain and simple truth.

“I’ve just picked my son up from a fight where some kid tried to burn his face off and he might have died from another seizure. No, I think I’m ready, ‘cause this has got to stop!”

Lysander snapped upright. “Then promise me you’ll stop going to see Reverend Small. Don’t even let him in the house anymore. No, I’m serious, Dad. You have to trust me.”

Glenn’s chest rose and fell. “You asked us to trust you back in Hayward and look what happened. We lost everything.” He let out the last remnant of a smoker’s cough and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Of all the people in the world, why Reverend Small? What has he ever done to you?”

A support beam somewhere deep within Lysander was giving way.

“He killed Derek tonight, Dad,” Lysander said it with such matter-of-factness that Glenn’s face turned pale. “And for some reason I don’t quite understand yet, he’s after me too.”

“Lysander! Reverend Small’s a good ma—”

“No, that’s where you’re wrong. He’s not a man. Maybe he
was
a man once, but not anymore. He’s something else now. And the more I think about it, the more I see that he’s been after me for a long time. Maybe ever since I was born.”

Lysander was breathing heavily, waiting for Glenn to cut in with a good

old-fashioned dose of common sense, but he never did. His father was listening, maybe for the first time in his life. Then Lysander decided to tell him everything, from the old picture of McMurphy Sam had seen to the clown man hunched over Derek with that look of demonic glee ...

Behind them, a car honked impatiently. The light had been green for nearly a minute. Glenn pulled ahead, driving like an old woman on her way to church. Lysander could see he was so deep in thought, his lips were working soundlessly.

Why shouldn’t he be? In the span of a few minutes, he had been told that everything he held to be true about the world was a lie.

When Glenn spoke, every word felt weighed and measured. “So you’ve gone to the police then?”

“The police here don’t believe me any more than they believed me in Hayward.”

Glenn started fiddling with the radio, searching through abrupt walls of hissing static. The crackling sound made Lysander uneasy and he reached over and snapped the radio off.