Hostage (2001) (28 page)

Dennis shoved Kevin toward the bedroom, Kevin with big bug eyes like they were gonna pop from his head, scrambling backwards because he was scared. They were supposed to be sleeping; the world was dark.

'They're doing it.'

'Nuh-uh. Stop saying that.'

'Can't ya hear'm! They're doin' the nasty. Let's go see.'

They had lived in more apartments than Dennis could remember, some for just a week or two, once for almost a year; dingy places with stained ceilings and toilets that ran. Flo Rooney usually worked a job, once she worked two, and more than once she had none. There was never enough money. Flo was a short woman with a body like a bowling ball, Q-Tip legs, and bad skin. She liked her gin and smelled of Noxzema. When she got in her mopes and had too much gin, she would bitch to the boys that she didn't have enough money to keep them, that she would have to put them in a home. Kevin would cry, but Dennis would pray: Please, please, put me in the fuckin' home. It was always about money.

Dennis shoved Kevin toward their mother's bedroom door. Both boys were trying to be quiet because she was with a man she had brought home from the bar. This month she was working as a barmaid, next month it would be something else, but there was always a man. She called them her 'little pleasures.' Dennis called them drunks.

'Don't ya want to see'm doin' it!'

'No!'

'You said you did! Listen to what he's doin' to her!'

'Dennis, stop! I'm scared!'

The scent of sweat and sex hung sharp in the air, and Dennis hated her for it. He was jealous of the time she gave them, and humiliated by what she let them do, and by what she did to them. He was ashamed, but at the same time excited. Her gasping, grunting curses drew him.

He pushed Kevin again, this time more gently.

'Go on. Then you'll know.'

This time Kevin went, creeping to the door. Dennis stayed on their sleeper couch, watching. He wasn't sure why he was pushing Kevin so hard to see; maybe he wanted Kevin to hate her as much as he did. With their father on the bum and Flo working, Dennis usually had to see after his younger brother, making their breakfast and getting them to school, seeing that Kevin got home okay and making dinner. If Dennis had to be Kevin's father and mother, there wasn't room for another. Maybe that was it, or maybe he just wanted to punish her.

Kevin reached the door and peeked inside. Dennis knew that something nasty was going on because he could hear the man telling her what to do. She hadn't even bothered to close the door.

Kevin watched for the longest time, and then he stepped into the door, right out in the open where their mother could see.

Dennis whispered loudly.

'Kev!'

Kevin sobbed, then began to cry.

Inside the room, the man yelled, 'Sonofabitch! Get the hell outta here!'

Kevin stumbled backward as the man came lurching through the door, naked and with a huge glistening erection. He was carrying his jeans.

'I'll teach you to watch, you little shit!'

He was a big man, his body white and arms dark, coarse and hairy with tattoos on his shoulders and a loose flabby gut. His eyes glowed bright red from booze and pot. He stripped a thick leather belt from the jeans, then chased after Kevin, swinging the belt. Its buckle was a great brass oval inlaid with turquoise. The belt came down, cracking across Kevin's back, and Kevin screamed.

Dennis drove into the man as hard as he could, flinging punches that had no effect, and now the belt was his, snapping across him over and over and over until all his tears were gone.

She never came out, and after a while the man went back into the room. Her little pleasure.

'Dennis?'

Dennis cleared his eyes, then slid off the bar stool.

'Be quiet, Kevin. I'm not leaving here until I can take that cash.'

Dennis went back to the office and unplugged the phone. There was no point in talking to the cops until he knew what to say. He wanted the money.

The Channel Eight news van was parked at the edge of the empty lot. The reporter was a pretty boy, couldn't have been more than twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that, who got off telling everyone he went to USC. Trojan this, Trojan that, God's a Trojan. A Trojan was a fuckin' rubber, but Seymore didn't say that. The reporter pool complained all evening because there were no toilets; the local cops promised that a honeywagon was coming out, but so far, zip.

Seymore asked the guy if it would be all right to step behind their van, take the lizard for a walk.

The pretty boy laughed, sure, but watch where you step, they got a regular lizard trail back there. Dick. Seymore thought he was the kind of guy who ordered chocolate martinis.

Seymore stepped behind the van where no one could see him and did two spoons of crank. It hit the top of his head like a blast of cold air and made his eyes burn, but it kept him awake. It was after two and all of them were fighting the hours. Seymore noted that the Asian chick with the hot ass kept ducking into her SUV and had a fine set of the sniffles to show for it. A regular one-woman Hoover convention.

Coming out from behind the van, Seymore saw the Channel Eight reporter conferring with his producer and cameraperson, a man with hugely muscled arms. They looked excited.

Seymore said, 'Thanks, buddy.'

'No problem. You hear? They're getting one out of the house.'

Seymore stopped.

'They are?'

'I think it's the father. He's hurt.'

A siren spooled up, and they all knew it was the ambulance. Every camera crew in the lot hustled to the street in hopes of a shot, but the ambulance left from a different exit; the siren grew louder, peaked, then faded.

Seymore's phone rang as the siren dopplered away. He answered as he walked away, lowering his voice but unable to hide his irritation. He knew who it was; he started right in.

'Why the fuck I gotta hear this from a reporter? Fuckin' Smith comes out, for chrissake, and I gotta learn about it last?'

'Do you think I can get to a phone any time I want? I'm right out front in this; I have to be careful.'

'All right, all right. So tell me, was he talking? The guy here says he was hurt.'

'I don't know. I couldn't get close enough.'

'Did he have the disks? Maybe he had the disks.'

'I don't know.'

Seymore felt himself losing it. Fuckups like this could cost him his ass.

'If anyone should know, it's you, goddamnit. What the fuck are we paying you for?'

'They're taking him to CanyonCountryHospital. Go fuck yourself.'

The line went dead.

Seymore didn't have time to get pissed about it. He called Glen Howell.

Chapter
17

Friday, 11:36 P.M.

Pearblossom, California

It was late when Mikkelson and Dreyer found Krupchek's trailer, a thirty-foot Caravan split at the seams, waiting for them at the end of a paved road in Pearblossom, a farm community of fruit orchards and day workers in the low foothills at the base of the AntelopeValley. That was Mikkelson's notion when they finally found the damned place, that it was waiting, wide, flat, and dusty, the way a desert toad waits for a bug.

Dreyer swiveled the passenger-side floodlight and lit up the place. Somewhere under the dust, it was pale blue going to rust.

Dreyer, more cautious by nature, said, 'You think we should wait for Palmdale?'

Mikkelson, anxious to get inside, said, 'Why'd we go to the trouble of getting the warrant, if we're gonna wait? We don't have to wait. Leave the light.'

Krupchek's road ran the gut of a shallow canyon between two low ridges. No streetlights, no cable TV, no nothing out here; they had phone service and power, but that was about it; the sun went down, it was black.

Mikkelson, tall and athletic, behind the wheel because she got carsick when Dreyer drove, got out first. Dreyer, short and square, came up beside her, the rocky soil crunching. Both had their Maglites. They stood there, staring at the trailer, both a little bit nervous.

'You think anyone is home?'

'We'll find out.'

'You think that's his car?'

'We'll run the tag when we finish inside.'

An eighties-era Toyota Camry, itself dusty and speckled with rust, sat outside the darkened trailer.

They were late getting here, having gone to the Rooneys' apartment first, where they'd had to dick around with his landlord and the goofy woman who lived above them, the stupid cow asking over and over if she was going to be on the news. Mikkelson had wanted to slap her. When they had finally come up to Pearblossom, finding the trailer had been a bitch because it was dark and these little roads weren't marked, most of them, so they'd had to stop to ask directions three times. The last stop, a Mexican up from Zacatecas who worked for rich women as a stable groom, turned out to live next door. Here's the Mexican, a small man with his small wife and six or seven small children, saying that Krupchek kept to himself, never any sounds, never any trouble, had only spoken with Krupchek the one time someone had left a heart carved of bone on their step, the Mexican walking over that evening to ask if it was Krupchek, Krupchek saying no, then closing the door. No help there.

Mikkelson said, 'Let's go.'

They approached the trailer, then walked from end to end, just looking. It was like they didn't want to touch it, these creepy feelings you get.

Dreyer said, 'How do we get in? We look for a key or something?'

'I don't know.'

Here they had the warrant, but how did they get in? They hadn't thought of that.

Mikkelson rapped on the door with her Maglite, calling, 'Anyone in there? This is the police.'

She did that twice, getting no answer, then tried the door, one of those flimsy knobs that was tougher than it looked. It was locked.

'We could jimmy it, I guess.'

'Maybe we should try to find the landlord, have him open it.'

The Mexican had told them that all the land along the road was owned by a man named Brennert, who rented out the properties, mostly to migrant farmworkers.

'Shit, that'll take forever. We'll just pop the damned thing.'

Dreyer made a dogged face, unhappy.

'I don't want to pay for breaking it.'

'We've got the warrant, we're not going to have to pay.'

'You know the bastard might sue, not Krupchek but Brennert. You know how people are.'

'Oh, hell.'

Dreyer could be like that. He was terrified of getting sued. They talked about it all the time, how police officers were sued right and left these days just for doing their jobs, Dreyer hatching plans to put everything in his wife's name to protect it from the lawyers.

Mikkelson got the tire iron from their trunk, wedged it in the jamb by the knob, and popped the door. She put her back into it because these damned things were always stronger than they looked.

A smell like simmering mustard greens rolled out at them.

'Jesus, does this guy ever wash?'

Mikkelson leaned inside, feeling full of herself because this was the first time she had ever broken into a property with the full force of the law behind her and it felt pretty damned cool.

'Anyone home? Knock, knock, knock, it's your friendly neighborhood police.'

'Cut the crap.'

'Relax. There's no one in here.'

Mikkelson found the light switch and stepped inside. The interior of the trailer was dingy and cramped with tattered furniture in listless colors, stifling with accumulated heat.

Dreyer said, 'Well, okay, now what?'

But it was Dreyer who saw them first, having turned to the kitchen, Dreyer saying, 'Jesus, look at that.'

It would have been funny except there were so many of them; five or six boxes, maybe, or even ten or twelve, and Mikkelson would have laughed, making a joke, but the overwhelming sight of so many screamed insanity in a way that made her cringe. Later, the Sheriff's forensics people would count: Seven hundred sixteen Count Chocula boxes, empty, flattened, and folded, all neatly bound with cord, stacked against the walls and on the kitchen counters and in the cupboards in great teetering towers, each box mutilated in exactly the same way, a single cigarette burn, charred and black, on the point of Count Chocula's nose. They would understand the burns later, too.

Dreyer, not getting the same creepy read as Mikkelson, went for the joke.

'You think he got something good for all these box tops?'

'Put on your gloves.'

'What?'

'The gloves. Let's be careful here.'

'It's cereal, for chrissake.'

'Just put on the gloves.'

'You think he ate it?'

'What?'