Corridor Man (12 page)

Chapter Forty

Prez’s celebration was on
the second floor of a ratty duplex over on the East side. The neighborhood had been on the decline since Pearl Harbor and the structure sat in the middle of a block of former single-family homes that had been converted to rental units seventy-five years ago. The woman who had rented this particular second-floor unit was being evicted at the end of the month and was more than happy to leave early and trade the keys to her apartment for a plane ticket back to Chicago and a couple hundred dollars.

They put the word out on the street that it was going to be a quiet affair. Prez picked up three street-tricks to join him. The girls called two more girlfriends bringing the total to five. Bobby was there, too, but no one paid any attention to him so he really didn’t count. As long as Prez continued to supply them with drugs and liquor the girls really didn’t care who was with them or what they wanted to do.

The party started a little after eleven on Wednesday night. A thong and a smile seemed to be the late-night dress code. They partied with a purpose until they passed out, then started right back at it after regaining consciousness. Cheap vodka and rum were the beverages of choice and Prez had plenty on hand, along with a virtual smorgasbord of drugs. Collectively, the attendees seemed to possess the maturity of twelve year-olds.

The guests of honor didn’t make an appearance until close to four on Friday morning. Two of the girls were still partying. Two were passed out and one had simply disappeared. Bobby was watching the street out the front window when he heard a noise out on the back stairs.

The stairs were wooden and attached to the exterior of the house. They rose up half a story, then made a ninety-degree turn around the back corner of the house climbing toward a large bay window that had been converted to the back door. Prez had loosened one of the stair treads as an early warning system. The stumbling on the tread, along with the accompanying cursing, was what Bobby had heard.

Prez was stretched out on a recliner when Bobby shook him awake. The two women still conscious remained kneeling at the coffee table completely focused on the glass pipe they’d been passing back and forth and ignored Bobby.

“Back door,” Bobby said as he shook Prez lightly on the shoulder.

“Now?” Prez whispered as he came awake.

Bobby nodded, then said “Come on, just like we practiced.”

Prez floated silently into the small, darkened kitchen. The refrigerator stood next to the back door and he took up his position along the far side.

One of the street-tricks was seated on an old wooden chair in front of the kitchen sink, passed out cold. She could have been a young-looking thirty or an old-looking sixteen. Her head was tilted back and rested on the edge of the kitchen counter. Her mouth was open wide and she was snoring loudly.

She had an unbuttoned short sleeve blouse partially draped over her shoulders but was otherwise naked. From where she sat she was plainly visible in the moonlight shining through the window.

Bobby waited back in the small pantry that led to the front room. He held one of Prez’s pistols in his shaking hand.

It seemed like hours before the backdoor knob began to quietly turn. The door opened no more than a half-inch and remained that way for a minute or two. Then, ever so slowly, the door swung open. Any noise it may have made was masked by the snores coming from the comatose female on the chair.

As the door opened Bobby could just make out a shadowy, crouched figure. It remained very still and the head seemed to be cocked, listening. Over Bobby’s pounding heartbeat the occasional laugh or drunken screech drifted in from the two party animals out in the front room.

The shadow suddenly rose and cautiously tip-toed across the kitchen. He stopped to look at the woman snoring in the chair and pulled the blouse off her shoulder as a second shadow appeared behind him and gave a quiet chuckle. Bobby detected curly hair. Dubuque and Mobile.

The first figure placed the barrel of a gun against the woman’s head and waved his free hand over her face. The gun appeared exceptionally large in the moonlight. Her snoring continued uninterrupted, regular and deep and he reached over and tugged on her right nipple.

There was a sudden, audible thunk and the rear shadow collapsed onto the floor. As the first figure began to spin around Prez quickly yanked him back by the collar. Bobby heard a “spiff” sound come from the pistol the figure held followed by two rapid thunks and the figure dropped to his knees. Prez hung onto his collar and slowly lowered him to the ground.

“Turn the light on and get them cuffed,” he said in a half whisper, then set a baseball bat on the ground.

Bobby was already flicking the light on. He pulled the arms of the curly haired figure behind his back and wrapped a plastic band tightly around his wrists. The man’s head moved slowly from side to side as he seemed to begin to regain consciousness.

“Which one is this?”

“That’s your pal, Dubuque. Dubuque, meet Bobby, Bobby, Dubuque,” Prez said, then snickered.

Prez tore off a length of duct tape and wrapped it over Mobile’s mouth, then around his ginger haired head. He quickly checked the pockets and pulled a wallet out from a back pocket. He and Bobby switched places. Bobby had to step over Mobile’s body and partially roll him over to secure his hands behind his back.

Mobile was completely limp and as Bobby rolled the body over a noticeable dent was apparent at the top of his skull reminding Bobby of a rotten cantaloupe. Blood trickled out of both ears and over the duct tape as Bobby wound it around the head. Drops of blood began to splatter onto the kitchen floor.

“There’s some severe trauma here,” Bobby said.

“I don’t think that’s going to make much difference. Check him for a gun, he’s got one somewhere,” Prez said, then opened the wallet from Dubuque’s back pocket and picked up the pistol he had been carrying.

The pistol was a large black affair with an attachment on the front of the barrel Bobby took to be a silencer which accounted for the noise he’d heard when Prez struck him. He glanced up toward the ceiling. Off to the right he saw a hole that must have been from the round that was fired.

Prez patted Mobile down on the floor but didn’t find anything. Then he saw a gun, halfway hidden alongside the refrigerator. Mobile must have dropped it there when he fell and Prez picked it up and handed the weapon to Bobby. Then Prez opened up a kitchen cabinet and walked into the front room with a fresh plastic fifth of vodka. Bobby couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the squeals of delight suggested it made the recipients happy.

“Help me get him up,” Prez said coming back into the kitchen and grabbing Dubuque’s arm. Together they pulled him to his feet, but he seemed to be unable to stand on his own. Prez checked his pockets again and came up with a set of car keys. “Let me go find their car, we’ll use it to haul them out of here.”

They leaned Dubuque against the wall and Prez went out the back door and thumped down the back steps sounding like he was taking them two at a time. He was back in just a couple of minutes.

“Must not have been too worried, they were parked just around the corner.”

“How did you know what they were driving?”

“Jesus. Just click the little button here until a set of lights flash on, pretty simple.”

It may have been simple, but in his naiveté it had never occurred to Bobby.

They dragged Dubuque down the steps. Just as they got to the landing where the steps made that ninety degree turn he began to put up a half-hearted struggle. Prez grabbed him by the belt and hair and half threw him down the steps. With his hands secured behind his back he landed face first, bounced a couple of times, then skidded down the final four or five wooden steps until his forehead came to rest against the concrete pad at the bottom where he remained very still.

“What the....”

“Oh yeah, I forgot, be careful,” Prez said. “Come on, let’s get him into the back of the car.”

The rear hatch was up and they dragged Dubuque toward the vehicle. He was either dead or completely unconscious. His feet left a trail as they dragged him across the dewy grass. They hoisted him unceremoniously into the rear of the vehicle and then went back upstairs to fetch his brother.

The woman on the chair in the kitchen was still snoring. Mobile remained on the floor in exactly the same position they’d left him in, but a small pool of blood had begun to spread across the floor outlining his skull.

The two women out in the front room sounded like they were arguing.

Bobby gave Prez a look. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“About to deal with it right now. I’ll be back.”

“You’re not going to.…”

“No, relax. Think I’m stupid?”

He walked out to the front room, more excited squeals a moment later and then he was back.

Bobby had a questioning look on his face.

“Just a little party treat, they’ll be going for hours after we leave and won’t be able to remember anything about it. Pick him up and let’s get this finished,” he said.

Chapter Forty-One

Prez drove the brother’s
car through an empty downtown, took the Wabasha Bridge across the Mississippi river and headed toward the Lilydale flats. Bobby followed in Prez’s car. They passed two other vehicles on the road, but it was still before sunrise and things were otherwise quiet. They stayed on the deserted Lilydale road, heading upriver for maybe a mile along an undeveloped stretch before Prez pulled off into a small gravel area along the shore. He made a U-turn then stopped and backed up so the rear end of the car was just a couple of feet from the water’s edge. By the time Bobby pulled alongside Prez was already out of the car and had the rear hatch open.

Bobby climbed out from behind the wheel and walked toward Prez. Even in the predawn darkness Mobile looked very dead. He didn’t appear to have moved and Bobby couldn’t tell if he was breathing. Prez took hold of him by the ankles and before Bobby could grab onto the body Prez dragged him out of the rear of the car. Mobile’s head dropped three feet and bounced across the gravel a couple of times as Prez took a couple of steps backwards and then dropped him at the river’s edge. Mobile’s feet splashed and the water flowed over his legs to about mid-calf.

Prez caught Bobby’s look. “Relax, not like it matters. They’re going to … Oh Jesus, damn it,” he said, then slowly reached into the small of his back and pulled out the large pistol with the silencer attached.

“Move out of the way, Bobby,” he said calmly, then chambered a round, raised the weapon and fired.

Bobby turned just in time to see Dubuque stumble forward and collapse on the ground with his legs twitching. Prez calmly walked toward him stuffing the pistol back into the small of his back, all the while shaking his head.

“You dumb shit. You always have to do things the hard way. Okay, suit yourself, but just remember, this wasn’t my idea,” he said, then laughed. He grabbed Dubuque by the ankles and dragged him face down across the gravel to the river’s edge where Mobile’s body lay.

“Bobby, check the back of my car. There should be a towing chain back there, get it for me,” he said.

“A chain?”

“Just get it, will you? Come on, we’re wasting time and this is probably not the best place to be hanging around.” He indicated Dubuque and Mobile with a glance.

Bobby opened the rear hatch of Prez’s car and looked around.

“There’s a chain in back here,” he called.

“That’s it, bring it over.”

Bobby gathered up the chain, galvanized links and lots of them, close to fifteen feet, very long and fairly heavy.

“What are you going to do with this?” Bobby asked.

“Here hold these,” Prez said and handed Bobby his wallet and cell phone.

Bobby dropped the galvanized chain on the river shore and took the items with a questioning look on his face.

“Apparently, you don’t watch enough movies,” Prez replied then began to wrap the chain around the brothers’ ankles. He had arranged them so they were lying back-to-back in the mud along the shore. In the graying light just prior to sunrise they both appeared awfully dead. Once he had finished wrapping the chain around the two of them he stood and flipped open a rather large knife. The blade seemed to sparkle in the dusky predawn and looked very sharp.

“What the hell are…”

“We can’t have them coming to the surface, at least not for a while,” Prez said casually. Then he pulled Dubuque’s T-shirt up like he was going to tickle him. He clenched the knife in his fist and in one fell motion jammed it up beneath Dubuque’s rib cage. He quickly began working a sawing motion across the stomach as the internal organs began spilling out into the river.

“Oh, God,” Bobby said and began to retch.

“Can’t risk someone finding them, least not for a while,” Prez said, then moved to the other side and repeated the same procedure on Mobile’s body. Once he was finished he kicked and half rolled the brothers further out into the water. He slit both their throats standing waste deep in the river before dragging the chained bodies deeper out into the river channel. He continued to wade away from shore, pulling the bodies behind him until eventually the water was up around his shoulders.

Dubuque and Mobile remained somewhere beneath the surface. Prez appeared to slide them past him and then push them further out toward the middle of the channel.

He remained out there with just his head and neck exposed as the current flowed over his shoulders. He continued to scan down river for a few minutes, staring at the circling eddies before he finally waded back onto shore.

“You gonna live?” he asked looking down at Bobby still on all fours. Prez half chuckled and shook his head.

Bobby was still swallowing his stomach back down in between taking deep breaths and trying to erase the vision. “Where do you think they’ll finally end up?”

“Probably no more than fifty feet from here. But if and when someone ever finds them there won’t be enough left to tell a story. The carp, catfish, all the other bottom feeders will nibble away at them till there’s nothing left.”

“What about their car?”

“We’re about to deal with that. You just follow me, then I’ll give you a lift back to your place.”

With that he pulled off his shoes, poured out some water and slipped them back on. “A hundred and twenty bucks a pair and these bastards are already shot,” he said and shook his head.

Bobby followed behind as Prez drove the brothers’ car up along the bluffs of Highway 13, then onto 35E heading back into town. It was a few minutes after sunrise and traffic was just beginning to pick up. It was nowhere near rush hour, but definitely busier than when they’d left the East Side with Dubuque and Mobile piled on top of one another.

Prez pulled onto a quiet side street along the edge of downtown and parked the car. He waited until Bobby pulled alongside of him, then he waved Bobby into the passenger seat and quickly slipped behind the wheel. “Okay, man, let’s roll.”

“You’re just leaving their car? Someone will spot it just sitting there for sure.”

“That’s the whole idea, sooner rather than later, with any luck. It’s unlocked with the keys in it. Best thing that could happen would be some high school kids get hold of it and take it for a spin for the next two or three months. By the time the cops find it, there’ll be so many kids in and out of the thing they won’t have a clue. Believe me, this works much better than burning it, hoping to hide it in some derelict garage or driving it out of state.”

“What if no one takes it?”

“You kidding? We’re two blocks from a McDonald’s, three blocks from a high school and Catholic Charities does their free meals around the corner. We couldn’t find a better spot if we tried. That thing will be gone before nine this morning. Now, I’m wet and I smell like river shit so maybe I can take us to that dump you live in and then I can get my ass home, shower and burn these damn clothes.”