SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (59 page)

“Like what?” she asked suspiciously.

“I think you ought to move in with me.” He had both hands on the wheel with the motor idling. He looked directly into Big Mac's eyes so she'd know he meant it—this was no joke, cruel or otherwise. He had thought about it for a long time, ever since she fell ill.

“Move in with you? You gotta be nuts.”

“No, I'm serious. Look, I'm a bachelor. I don't get time at home much so the place needs somebody to take a broom to it now and then. And I have a dog, a big dog, who needs company.”

“You know I don't take handouts of that sort, Samson.”

“It's not a handout. It might be a hand-up. Or a hand needed to steady me. I think I might be getting a little squirrely, living alone. I talk to myself.”

“So who doesn't?” Mac's eyes twinkled merriment. She was in a good mood, but she really wasn't buying his offer, he knew that.

“I think it would be an all around good thing, Mac. You need a place to stay, I need a housekeeper and a companion. What do you say? I could pay you.”

Mac looked out the window at the rows of cars in the parking lot's hot sunshine. “I don't need a place to stay. If I needed a place to stay, I'd get my own place.”

Samson sighed and sagged as he did so, his hands loosening on the steering wheel. “I wish you wouldn't be so goddamn stubborn. I'm asking you politely to help me out here.”

Mac turned on him. “Like hell you are! You got Pity City written all over your face. You think I could take that? You think I need your charity? I don't need nothing! Now will you drive me down to where you kept my stuff or do I have to walk all the way through town?”

Samson gave it up. He drove her to the station and told her to wait in the car while he got her shopping cart and personal possessions.

“You kept it in the police station?” she said in disbelief.

Samson grinned mischievously. “It's logged in with the stolen property. They had the room, they didn't mind.”

He came out a side door from the building, pushing the cart before him. It teetered, piled high with bags and clothes. He popped the trunk and stored it all there. The lid wouldn't close over the shopping cart, so he tied it securely with a rope. Back inside the car, with the air conditioning running full blast, he wiped his face of sweat. “That shit's heavy.”

“That shit's my shit and I'll thank you not to call it shit.”

He drove according to her directions down into the Montrose area and let her out on a corner. He had to double-park to unload her things. “You sure you won't change your mind?”

“I got no reason to sit in some man's house all day playing with no dog.”

“If you change your mind, you know where to call me.”

He drove away, keeping her in his rear-view mirror, watching while she stood in the gutter, pawing through her things jumbled in the cart. He didn't understand the world, he realized. He thought he did, he pretended he did, but he didn't know spit about what made people turn down a home, what made a woman want to live on the street instead. She was a little off in the brain department, sure, but she wasn't a basket case. Why couldn't she just come home with him and latch onto a real life, with a roof over her head? It wasn't like he was going to imprison her, for chrissake's.

Three days later Lt Epstein called him into the office. Jerry Dodge, hunched over his desk across from Samson, swigged from a Styrofoam cup of coffee and said, “I already know what he wants with you.”

“That so? Clue me in, Dod.”

Dod reached out and tapped the file folders holding the floaters. “Got another one.”

“I guess I expected as much.” Samson stood and straightened his tie. He reached for his sports jacket from the back of the chair and shrugged into it.

“You gonna form a task force?”

“I don't know yet, depends on what the boss says.”

“I could run legwork for you if you do.”

“Don't you have a full case load already?”

“Doesn't everybody? I'd still like to learn a little bit about how you track down serials.”

“Oh, you mean the glamor of the job. Yeah, it's real uptown, Dod. The guys in Quantico call me up all the time, fly me private jet into West Virginia, ask my opinion on where I think the Zodiac disappeared to, and if the Green River Killer's dead, in prison, or hanging out at the Vegas roulette tables.”

“You don't have to be sarcastic. I just offered.”

Samson paused. He leaned over toward Dod. “It's shit work, just like what you've got on your own desk. You wouldn't like it. It's more tedious than the Parole Violation Squad.”

“But there might be a promotion in it.” A knowing glint had come into Dod's eyes.

“I don't think so,” Samson said, heading for Epstein's office. “You've been misinformed.”

In the lieutenant's office he studied the file on the latest victim while the boss talked.

“We have a definite pattern now. This one clinches it. Guy's naked, poisoned, floating up the channel. Not much left of this one. As you can see . . .”

Samson stared at the photo of the dead man. Both eyes had been eaten from the sockets, his nose was gone, as were his lips. Although Caucasian, he was black from the water, and bloated so much he looked like someone had pumped him full of helium. Samson flipped the photo face down and looked at the next one. This was a close-up showing striations on the victim's heels.

“The ME say how he got these?”

“It's in his report in the top folder. He thinks someone dragged the corpse over rough ground after death. There were still bits of gravel imbedded in the skin.”

Samson closed the folder. He'd study it later. “I wonder if this one hung out around Montrose.”

Epstein shook his head. “I don't know. That's something you'll have to find out. What do you think so far? What's going on?”

Samson was careful. “I don't have anything solid yet. The other two were in clubs all up and down the streets. I have a feeling it has something to do with dancers. Maybe a crazy boyfriend, someone jealous of his ole lady.”

“Fucking poison, though, seems a boyfriend would just shoot the bastards. Well, get on it. The broadcast news tonight's going to do a five-minute report. They know about the poison. They might nickname the killer any day now.”

“Do you want me to gather some people, get some help?”

“Up to you. At this point you may not need it. Draft someone if you do. I don't want to get anything official-looking started yet, gives the case too much attention, makes it too easy for the reporters to camp on our doorstep.”

Samson took the folder to his desk. Picked up the phone. Needed to find out if the victim had been identified yet through his fingerprints.

“They already got it,” Dod said, swiveling in his chair to the portable TV sitting on a sideboard against the wall.

Samson put down the phone again. He looked up to see the mid-day newsman on Channel 2 speaking from the scene in Kemah. It was a video tape taken earlier when the body was found. “Turn it up.”

Dod rolled across the room in his chair and turned up the volume.

Mitchell watched the news spot while his stomach started to roil. The heat was on, the media was all over it. When that happened, it was always a real mess. The boss was right. The second he formed a task force, reporters would crawl over him, ants on a carcass, breathing down his neck, asking for updates, trying to follow him around, and getting in the way.

“Fuck,” he swore softly. Picked up the phone again and made his call.

~*~

That night, with the moon in full regalia and the stars more plentiful than other nights of recent recall, Son slipped out Sherilee's door and down the steps to the street. If he turned he knew he'd see her standing, watching him go, and she would give him a little wave goodbye.

Most of the time that kind of domestic scene would have warmed him. Tonight it just made him more nervous. These connections with people dragged him down. Sherilee. His mother. Women, fucking women. Even though you paid them for something, they started thinking they owned you.

He stopped at his car door, key in his hand. He didn't like women. Funny how he could miss a thing like that for so many years. Oh, he knew he would never marry one. He'd never have a regular honest relationship. But he'd never thought about it beyond that. Until now, with Sherilee standing on the porch in the moonlight watching him go, and that uneasiness creeping up from his back to his neck making him feel spied upon.

He didn't like women at all. He used Sherilee for sex, he needed that, but look at her. She was black. She was old—at least for her line of work. She was without any principles whatsoever. She'd do anything for money, anything he asked of her, do anything with anybody anytime.

Fucking whore dog.

And he didn't like his mother, either. He loved her, had to, he was her son, but he didn't like her. She was too rich in spirit, too accepting of what life handed her, too . . . good for him, oh, wasn't she now, too good . . .

He unlocked the car door and slid inside. Hot. Suffocating. Humidity, even at this time of night, in the nineties. He started the car and got the air conditioning going. Angled the vents on his face and shut his eyes. He hoped Sherilee had gone inside now. He'd hate to think she was still looking after him.

A lake of moonlight lay over the interior of the car, almost blinding in its brilliance. Son put the car into gear and screeched the tires as he left the curb.

He couldn't go home yet. Too bent out of shape. Pretzelized. That was a good word for how he felt.

Bent into figure eights, baked hard and lightly salted.

He drove slowly down the inner city streets. A patrol car passed him. A cab. Two cars empty except for lone drivers. Both men. Women didn't drive through Houston late at night, alone. Wasn't done except during an emergency of some sort. There were too many “bump and robs” where guys bumped into the rear of a woman driver, waited until she got out to check for damage, then took her car or took her and the car. Too many drive-by shootings. Too many dope dealers high on their own products crazy enough to jerk a woman out of the driver's seat at a stoplight and beat her face in just for kicks.

Too many of everything!

Son pounded at the dash. Damned air conditioning didn't blow cool enough. Needed to get it fixed. You couldn't buy your own cans of freon to fill up a leaking compressor anymore. EPA had outlawed the stuff because of the damaged ozone layer. Now you had to go in to a repair shop and pay hundreds of dollars to get the fucker fixed. What would they think of next to persecute honest, hard-working citizens?

An entrance ramp came up for the Loop. Son took it, driving aimlessly. He circled around the city until he came to the I-45 South exit, took it. Maybe it would be cooler down by the ocean.

He wanted to get a look at the channel anyway, the one that separated Kemah and Seabrook, the one where they brought in the bodies.

None of the restaurants were open this late. He parked on a spit of land outside the little town of Seabrook where the channel flowed on the right and ahead lay the bay. He got out of the car and walked over to the bulkhead. A dozing gull flew off with a squawk.

The wind was blowing here, smelling briny. It ruffled his hair back from his forehead and caressed his cheeks. He saw a freighter out in the bay, its lights outlining the ship's body. A moon path stretched wide from the horizon to the bulkhead, like a silver highway.

Four dead men had walked it lately. From somewhere out there, where they slipped beneath the waves, they rolled and tumbled and were nudged by currents and fish back toward land.

It would soon be morning and the moon hidden.

Son turned abruptly and hurried to the car. He had to get home, he'd forgotten. His mother shouldn't be alone, not all night this way. What if she needed to go to the bathroom? What if she tried it by herself and fell? Or stayed in bed and wet herself? What if her heart gave out and she'd called for him?

Jesus God, all he thought about was himself Having sex, finding a cool breeze, driving all the fuck the way down I-45 to SeaForsakenBrook just to look at the water.

He had to get home. Now.

~*~

“Mother? Mother?” He came into the house calling her name. He got her bedroom door open, panicking, still calling for her, “Mother?”

“Son! What is it?”

She turned on the bedside lamp and the room exploded into light. She was up on one elbow, squinting at him, frowning at him.

He was shaking all over, trembling so badly his teeth chattered uncontrollably. All the way home across the city he had let his imagination run wild until he was sure, sure she had died while he'd been gone.

“Oh, Mother, I'm sorry. I . . . I didn't mean to wake you . . . I was . . .”

“Son, what's the matter? You're shaking. Sit down right this minute. You look awful.”

She tried to rise from bed. Her color was bad. She looked yellow in the lamplight. Her eyes were watery and there were blue hollows underneath them. He put out his hands, “Don't move, just stay there. I'm all right. I'll sit down.” He collapsed in the chair and put his hands over his face.

“Son? Honey, what's wrong?”

“I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I was out, we played cards too late, and I didn't notice the time. I got scared, that's all. It was silly.”

“Sweetheart. You were worried about me. You needn't do that. I sleep all night, you know that. I never call for you on your card nights. You always make sure I have everything I need.”

I'm a good son, he thought. I really am.

“Do you want me to sit up with you a while? Would you like to talk?”

He lowered his hands from his face. “We need to get you to that appointment,” he said. “We've put it off too long already.”

“I'm going to be fine.” She adjusted the covers over her chest.

“You haven't been doing so well lately. You need a checkup. They should see about your medications, maybe they aren't strong enough.”

“You can't fix this old heart, Son. No one can. Worrying about things you can't change will only waste your time.”

“You don't want to die, do you?” He hadn't meant to raise his voice. He was out of control and hated that, hated it.