Dead Last (8 page)

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“No, sir, I’m not doing that. That’s my given name. It’s strange, yeah. My old man was a New Age lunatic. Buddha was a big deal to him.”

“Stand over here where I can see you.”

He motioned with Rusty’s .45, and the young woman complied, stepping to her left. She had her hands clasped behind her back like a monk in prayerful contemplation.

“Mr. Thorn, you’re going to have to put that weapon down. I’m a police officer, and having a gun pointed at me, well, that’s something I can’t abide.”

“You’re no police officer.”

“Well, yes, sir, actually I am. But I assure you, you’re not in any trouble. Certainly nothing that would warrant a shootout.”

She smiled at him, but when he didn’t return it, hers melted away.

He couldn’t place her drawl. Ozarks, perhaps, or maybe rural West.

“You’re not old enough to be a cop.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Like I said. You’re no cop. Now get out of here.”

“Yes, sir, it’s true, I’m a bit young. Still, where I’m from it’s legal age, and nobody wanted the job. Small town, low pay, not much action. But my fellow citizens knew I had an interest in law enforcement, so hell, they got together and elected me.”

“Where is that? The place you’re from?”

She was silent. She drifted a couple of steps to the right, taking a soft angle in his direction. Arms still behind her back like she was cuffed.

“Most people never heard of my dinky town. Just two stoplights, a cowboy bar, a Dairy Queen, and a Dollar General. But maybe you know it, because your wife, Ms. Stabler, was born there. Starkville, Oklahoma.”

SIX

THORN WAS DIGESTING THAT, WATCHING
her take another step his way.

“Look, Mr. Thorn, before we get any farther along, you’re going to need to set that weapon down.”

“If I don’t?”

“I don’t believe we want to explore that alternative.”

“You’re here on official business?”

“Call it half and half. Official, and personal.”

“Forget it,” Thorn said. “You got a problem, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Take it somewhere else. Get out of here. I don’t want any part of this. I’ve had two lifetimes of problems already.”

“I understand. You lost your wife, you’re mourning.”

“You hear me? Get out of here now. Go haul your ass back to Oklahoma. I don’t want anything you’re selling.”

She stepped closer to Thorn by a few more inches. Her face rippled in the firelight. Pale skin etched with black squiggles.

“That’s it,” Thorn said. “Cop or no cop.”

He raised the pistol. Only to turn her around and get her headed to her car. To show her how serious he was. This was his land; she was trespassing.

He saw the first muzzle flash then heard a roar, and another blast and one more after that. His right hand bucked, and on its own, his arm flew straight up in the air like some eager schoolkid waving for attention.

A whanging pain erupted in his hand as if he’d been hammered with a sledge. Thorn stumbled to his right, his shoulder numb. Rusty’s pistol, her dad’s suicide gun, was tumbling through the grass.

“Okay, now,” she said. “Are we cool?”

“You shot that out of my goddamn hand.”

“Didn’t give me much choice.”

“In the dark.”

“Firelight helped. It wasn’t that tough a shot.”

“You missed twice and kept shooting.”

“Missed three times actually.”

“Christ, you could’ve blown my hand off.”

“I factored that in.”

“That’s from some half-assed cowboy movie.”

Stepping closer, wary, her pistol raised, a .38.

“Movie gunslingers get it on the first try. This was a little messier than I would’ve liked.”

Thorn’s chest was hammering. The ash from the fire stung his eyes and his throat burned with its bitter taste.

“Isn’t much crime around Starkville, so I spend a good bit of time out at the shooting range. I got a good eye and a steady aim.”

Thorn tried to work his fingers.

“Not steady enough.”

“Probably should ice that hand,” she said. “Gonna get puffy and sore. Could’ve broken something. Can you move your fingers?”

“You’ve done that a lot, have you?”

“No, sir. You’re my first. Pictured it a few times, but never had sufficient provocation.”

She smiled and the firelight lit up her cheeks. They were covered by strange black hieroglyphics.

Thorn tried to make a fist but couldn’t close the hand. No fractures but an ache rooted deep in the tissues.

“There’s ice,” he said. “Inside.”

In the laundry room off the kitchen, Thorn found a bath towel and wrapped it around his waist. He ran cold water over his hand while Buddha scooped ice cubes from the freezer and dumped them into a mixing bowl. She stayed at arm’s length, pistol at the ready.

When the bowl was full, Thorn slid his throbbing hand among the cubes and examined the woman in the kitchen lights. Her bangs were ragged across her forehead, the hair butchered on top in no discernible style, and on both sides of her head she was shaved to the scalp. It was as bad a haircut as he’d ever seen, as if she’d barbered herself during a seizure. She had a soft oval face and wide-set dark eyes, a small chin, pretty mouth. Though all of that was hard to make out clearly through the hundreds of tiny markings that were lined up in parallel rows across the pale flesh of her cheeks and forehead like a battalion of insects marching into battle.

“Tattoos,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”

Thorn hadn’t been a fan of tats until Rusty converted him. She had an elegant pink butterfly tribal design inked at the base of her spine, just above her rump, a drawing that Thorn never tired of tracing with his fingertips. It was their own erogenous zone. An elaborate and artful G-spot.

Folks like Rusty with two or three tattoos were simply marking themselves with the sacred symbols of their beliefs. Exercising their individuality. But serious tattoo junkies, the ones who covered themselves from head to toe, were a different breed. To them the hot scratch of the needle became a chemical addiction, and their swirly, colorful designs covering every inch of arms and legs and backs and torsos were topographic maps of their pain.

Rusty believed their secret goal was to disappear behind the murals of embedded ink, to divert the eyes of onlookers to the artwork and away from the sad disclosures of their faces.

But even in the world of tattoo freaks, this young woman was an extreme case. The outlandish tats that disfigured her cheeks and forehead and chin were like a veil drawn across her features, all but hiding her from view.

“Okay, you have my attention,” he said. “Ask your questions, then go.”

“Thank you.”

She took her time. Ambled around the kitchen, appraising the ancient appliances, the tile countertops, the pickled wood cabinetry. Still with the pistol in her hand, she touched a fingertip to a line of grout and traced its straight edge down the length of the counter.

“I’m investigating the homicide of Michaela Stabler.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Rusty never mentioned the name?”

“Why would she?”

At the side window she halted her tour of the kitchen and stared outside at the bonfire’s dying flames.

While she was distracted, Thorn quietly slipped his hand from the bowl of ice and stepped around the counter. He eased behind her, eyes on the pistol held loosely in her hand. He didn’t know if she was a cop or not. He didn’t know who the hell she was. But she was a stranger, and she was inside his house with a revolver in her hand, and in Thorn’s view, that was unacceptable.

He set his feet, timed his move, then snapped his left hand for the gun. But the young woman was wound tighter than she appeared. She slid to her right, chopped the edge of her free hand against his wrist, and danced out of range. She brought the pistol up again to sight on Thorn’s face.

“Dude, you’re getting old and slow.”

Thorn held his ground.

“And so predictable,” she said. “Rash and brash just like she said.”

“Who said?”

“Rusty Stabler, your wife.”

“What the hell do you know about Rusty?”

“I know a good bit about her, and way too much about you.”

She was studying him intently as if trying to match his face to some image in her head.

“You don’t know shit.”

“Okay, for one thing,” she said, “I know you’ve been living off the grid since before there even was a grid.”

Thorn tightened the towel around his waist.

“I know you punched the ticket for at least half a dozen people over the years. Always for some righteous cause, of course, or in self-defense. Maybe the people you took down were bad guys, maybe they weren’t, but any way you look at it, you’ve got serious blood on your hands.”

Thorn stepped back to the counter and looked around at the bare room.

“I also know that for the last twenty years, you’ve been a party to one disaster after another. People around you die on a regular basis.

“I know you had a steady stream of women in and out of your bedroom. And hardly any of those ladies came to a good end. All in all, you’ve put together an impressive list of fuck-ups.”

She stared coolly into his eyes the way Sugarman did when speaking some hard truth. It was a cop thing, that disengagement, a necessary discipline in police work—the way they insulated themselves from all the crazed morons they had to deal with, ones who’d lost contact with reason and moral clarity. Cops tended to go far off in the other direction, becoming coldly rational, neutral, rulebook bound. At least on the outside.

“I also know you tie some kind of fishing lures that you sell to a bunch of fussy fishermen. The cash that brings in just gets you by. And I know you don’t have a social security card or a driver’s license or any kind of legal ID. You graduated from high school but dropped out of college like you dropped out of pretty much everything. Don’t socialize, keep to yourself, a hermit, push everybody away except your private eye buddy Sugarman and an occasional lucky lady. Or at least they think they’re lucky at first. Until they’re dead because of you.”

“That’s enough,” Thorn said.

“I also know the only reason you legally married Rusty Stabler was ’cause she was dying of stage-four pancreatic cancer and you thought it would make her happy to be married. And it did. It made her damn happy. So mark up one success. You made Rusty Stabler happy for a month. Thank god for that.”

Thorn was silent. Peering at her, trying to see past that mask of tats.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Thorn, but now that I have a firsthand look, I believe I’m beginning to get the real picture. Here you are, all tragic and tender and starry-eyed, with your sandy hair and your square jaw and blue Romeo eyes. Which helps explain all those good-hearted, innocent women falling onto your mattress.

“But we both know there’s another guy inside, a wild-eyed screwup with a taste for risk and ruination. Just so happens, I spent years studying your type. Mind you, it wasn’t because I particularly wanted to.

“My own daddy played your game. A charmer who came across as decent and moral, as upright as any man you ever met. Everything dark and twisted he did always started out with noble intentions.

“A lot of upstanding ladies fell for his act. But it was all a fraud. ’Cause inside that man, in his heart of hearts, he wasn’t looking for a woman to love and nurture, he was scouting the next calamity. Women thought he was courting them, but what he was really courting was disaster. Any of that sound familiar?”

“I’m honored,” Thorn said. “You came all this way to deliver that rousing speech.”

“No, sir. I came all this way because a woman got murdered. A good, honest woman who was more mother to me than my flesh-and-blood mom. She happened to be Rusty’s aunt. She and Rusty exchanged e-mail, lots of messages back and forth over the years. Rusty described her life with you, what was going on in her heart. And Michaela Stabler shared some of that with me. So that’s why I’m here. A woman was cruelly murdered in my peaceful, law-abiding town. And you, Mr. Thorn, are smack in the middle of it.”

Thorn held her eye for several moments, then broke away from her biting gaze and padded into the living room. Only two couches were left. All the small stuff, the chairs, end tables, and bookshelves he’d tossed into the fire. The room seemed bigger, cold and strange.

He sat on the long white couch, tucked the towel close between his legs.

“Don’t worry about flashing me,” Buddha said. “I already had a good look at that ding-dong. It’s nothing special.”

Thorn glanced out the French doors into the side yard where the fire was burning low. Dawn coming. A pale russet glow out on the water.

“Rusty had an aunt?”

“Michaela Stabler. She was murdered last Saturday night, July twenty-fourth.”

“And you think I had something to do with it.”

“I don’t think it, I know it to be true.”

“Because of my blemished past.”

“That’s one thing. But by itself that wouldn’t bring me this far.”

“Why did you do that to your face? All those marks.”

“I didn’t.”

“Bullshit.”

“What do you say we keep this moving in the right direction?”

Thorn’s eyelids were heavy, weariness overtaking him. The all-night purge, the frantic cleansing, the roar in his blood had left him empty. The last fumes of his destructive outburst had burned off. He felt as if he might be slipping into a trance. A long, dreamless vacation from earthly cycles.

Maybe if he chose not to fight it, didn’t pinch himself, just drifted off into the beckoning shadows, everything would be over. Everything would go away and he could rest for a month. That’s how it felt. Drift away and be done. When he woke and returned to his body and his house, it would all be simple again. As easy as letting his head rest against the soft cushion of the couch. Leave this woman, this room, this new crisis, just drop away and go.

“What do you know about Zentai?”

Thorn straightened, cleared his eyes, looked at this small strange woman.