Good Day to Die (19 page)

“Wake up, motherfucker.”

I smashed the rifle butt into the bridge of his nose without waiting for a response.

He woke up screaming. Blood was pouring from his nose. It ran over and into his mouth, momentarily choking him. I took advantage of his confusion by crushing his right ear. That got him to his feet, got him up and running. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten about his dropped trousers and he fell, head first, onto the grass.

“What’re you doing? What’re you doing?” His hands were in front of his face. As if they could stop a bullet.

“I’m tired,” I muttered, my voice ten years older than my body. “I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m tired.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember what I was tired of. There were so many things, I didn’t know which to mention first.

“Don’t shoot me, Roland. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll leave right now.”

I hated him even more, then. I hated him for not fighting back, for taking it, for accepting the idea that might makes right. I had a gun and therefore I was stronger. And therefore he would submit as he’d expected me to submit.

My finger tightened on the trigger. I was a veteran hunter by that time and knew, to the millimeter, exactly how far that trigger would have to move before Mike’s luck ran out. And he knew it, too. He could see it through the alcohol, through the pain, through the blood.

He began to crawl away, and this time I didn’t follow. I watched him drag his body through the dirt, watched drops of blood fall from his chin to mix with the dust. When he was thirty feet away, I released the trigger.

“Why don’t you pull your pants up, Mike?” I said, my voice as calm as if nothing had happened. Nothing at all. “You look stupid.”

After my shower, I soaped my face and began to shave. Bouton and I had agreed to interview Kennedy’s brother and, if possible, his father, the next day. The drive upstate would take at least four hours, and Bouton had insisted we get an early start, which meant I’d be lucky to snatch a few hours’ sleep. It also meant I’d be in no shape (or mood) to shower and shave in the morning.

It didn’t take me long to shave; I don’t have much of a beard, an inheritance, most likely, from my Indian father. Still, I was careful about it, soaping and dragging the razor across every inch of my face. When I was finished, I walked into the bedroom, stripped, laid out the day’s wardrobe, and got into bed with my favorite sleeping pill, Miriam Brock’s treatise on the sexually motivated murderer.

I skimmed through what I’d read, fairly disgusted by the dry, academic tone which I took to be a disguise for her psychologist’s bleeding heart. I kept waiting for her to mention the simple fact that tens of thousands of children had gone through similar experiences without becoming murderers. To somewhere discuss the role of choice.

It never happened, of course. She spoke about these men as if they were machines, as if, the ingredients having been mixed, the recipe followed, their fates were sealed. As for me, I’d rather be thought of as a vicious killer than a programmed robot. Killers, at least, are human.

Ms. Brock wrote:

Social isolation was the final and, in some ways, the most important factor in the progression from abused, terrified child to adult murderer. As children, children sustained by obsessive, often sadistic fantasy, these men might have been saved (and, we theorize, many children were saved) by the give-and-take of peer association. Our murderers, virtually to a man (see Table 4), report little or no meaningful contact with other children. They remained isolated, not only through their childhoods and adolescences, but virtually throughout their lives. This not only intensified their retreat into fantasy, it also reinforced the value of fantasy to their fragile psyches.

Their
fragile psyches?
It’s hard to imagine a grown man who stalks and kills strangers for the fun of it, who relives his triumphs again and again, gloating in the fear of his victims, as fragile.

As for me, I passed my childhood in a shack five miles from my closest neighbor. By the time I started school, I was already pretty odd, having spent more time in the forest than most of the other kids had spent out of their parents’ sight. My yellow skin and narrow, slanty eyes compounded that oddity, and somewhere along the line, my peers, male and female, began to call me Hiawatha. I put an end to their teasing in a hurry, but, as I’ve already said, my ability to kick their mean little butts all over the schoolyard didn’t make them like me.

Looking back on it, I didn’t remember shedding any tears over my unpopularity. The forest had been my refuge (and my friend) before I ever started school, and it continued to be my refuge right up until the day I took off for boot camp. The only curious part was the fact that I’d never gone back to it. That I hadn’t, up to that point, left New York City in ten years.

I dumped Miriam Brock on the floor by the side of the bed and turned off the light. Imagining her in a prison interview room, face-to-face with her homicidal subjects. Wondering if she’d ever examined her own motivations. If there hadn’t been a slight sexual motivation underlying her interest in serial killers. Perhaps some itty-bitty, teeny-weeny twinge when she asked them for the gory details.

“Did you have sex with your victims before or after you killed them, Mr. Smith? Was the intercourse vaginal? Or did you bury it in their sweet, round butts? And, of course, I’ll have to know many times you ejaculated.”

I
’M STANDING ON A
railroad track in the middle of a remote, dense forest. A train approaches. I can’t hear it, but I can see it; I can see the train’s headlight as it alternately fixes me in its glare, then disappears behind the trees. Or, I
assume
it disappears behind the trees. I can’t see the trees, and all I know for sure is that I am sometimes bathed in a merciless glare and sometimes left in absolute darkness. Should I be afraid? Should I face the onrushing locomotive? Should I leap off the tracks and take cover? Is there any cover to take?

I don’t know how long it went on, but at some point I realized that I was dreaming and began to wake up. The only problem was the dream persisted, even after I opened my eyes.

POP!

The constellation of dancing lights was beautiful. Baffling, but beautiful.

POP!

“What the hell?”

“Perfect, Means. I’ve finally got it.”

“Marie?”

POP!

“Jesus Christ.”

I put the pillow over my face, trying to buy enough dark to restore my sight. The author of my nightmare was Marie Koocek, monumental sculptor, uninhibited lover, dedicated lunatic. Marie had been trying to capture my “essence” with a cheap Instamatic for the better part of a year. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what she’d do with it, since most of her work consisted of welded I-beams decorated with rubbish she picked up (“rescued” was the word she preferred to use) off the streets. Marie, when she wasn’t lonely enough (or horny enough) to seek my company, spent her nights roaming the boroughs in a dilapidated pickup truck.

I flipped the pillow in her general direction, grabbed for the camera, and caught a piece of her wrist.

POP!

As wrestling-foreplay goes, it was a fairly even match. Marie had never been demure, and years of pounding chisels into chunks of stone (when she wasn’t welding five-ton I-beams) had turned her arms to steel. Nevertheless, I managed to strip away the camera and her clothing (mostly because she was too busy stripping away mine to resist) and get down to business.

Marie and I had a perfect relationship. Each of us knew what we wanted and, more importantly, what we didn’t want. It was a union without the need for possession or jealousy. Which is not to say it was based entirely on sex. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t glad to see her, and I took her efforts to capture my true, final, irreducible self for the compliment it was. There was nothing Marie hated more than mediocrity.

She took me inside her, wrapped her legs around the backs of my thighs, and locked me down. I settled into a long, slow grind (exactly what she wanted) and ran my tongue over the broad bones that framed her face. She responded with her lips and with hands sensitive enough to transform a lump of clay into a rainbow.

We were both soaked with sweat by the time we finished. I started to pull away, but she held me close, demanding that I remain inside her until I softened completely.

It didn’t take all that long, and within a few minutes I was headed for the john to dispose of the condom we were both smart enough to insist on. When I came out, I put my hands over my face, expecting another Instamatic onslaught, but Marie’s camera lay forgotten on the carpet. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, absorbed in Miriam Brock’s
American Psychology
article.

“What’s this all about, Means? You going back to school?”

“I’m trying to figure out why I’m not a serial killer,” I said, surprising myself with the bitterness evident in my voice. “Being as I’ve had the required education.”

She looked up, fixing me with pale gray eyes. “Maybe it’s because you don’t sprinkle your victims with Cheerios. Before you eat them.”

“You think it’s funny?” I ignored her protest and dug the autopsy photos out of Pooch’s evidence box. “Because this is what all the bullshit in that article really looks like.”

I laid them on the bed in nice, neat rows, then stepped back to give her a close look. She didn’t pull away, but then I didn’t expect her to; she picked the photos up, one at a time, carefully examining each of them.

“This is Thong’s work, right?”

“Work?”
I paused, but she was too smart to reply. Instead, she stared up at me, her mouth curved into a bemused smile. “You know what bothers me about people like Miriam Brock?” I continued. “They really
believe
they’re describing something. They think they’re fucking scientists. And that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that someone
pays
them to pursue their bullshit delusions. They’re government funded. Or they get time off from their teaching duties. Or they milk private foundations for grant money. I’m telling you, Marie, morons like Miriam Brock will
never
know why people like Thong do what they do. Or why millions of kids experience everything the men in that study experienced and don’t become killers.”

She stared at me for a moment before she finally spoke. “Jesus, Means,” she said, “I really love the way your cock bounces against your leg when you pace. And I wonder what it feels like. That’s the whole game, of course. Knowing what you can’t possibly know.”

“Thanks for the insight. Think I should write it down?”

She gathered her clothes and began to dress. We had a game we liked to play in the shower, play with our hands and a greasy bar of soap. I’d been looking forward to it, but … ring up another victory for Ms. Brock.

I sat down next to Marie and said the wrong thing. As usual. “What’s the matter, Koocek? You got a hot date with a dumpster?”

She stopped, turned, and fixed me with one of her piercing stares. Marie was small-breasted, and I remember thinking that her pale nipples, set in that broad muscular chest, looked like an extra pair of eyes.

“It’s not a curse,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Going inside, going back? It’s not a curse; it’s an obligation. If it hurts? If it changes you? If it lifts you out of your comfortable chair and propels you into another life … well, that’s what obligation’s all about.”

“Yeah? And what’s your obligation? To get out of here as fast as you can?”

Her eyes widened slightly. In shock, I think. We weren’t in the habit of controlling each other’s time. But I didn’t want to be alone, and I wasn’t strong enough to conceal it.

“You up for a blow-job, Means?” Marie didn’t smile much, but when she did, her face opened to reveal deep, childish dimples.

“Up? Not yet, but soon.”

Soon turned into an hour of very slow, mostly oral sex. I wouldn’t call it love, but there was a great deal of tenderness in the way Marie stroked me. She’d once told me that in the early days, when she was still working in clay, she insisted on touching her models because she wanted to see with her fingers instead of her eyes. Now, as those same fingers traced the lines of flesh and bone, from my face to my feet, I knew she was reaching beneath the surface. Looking for something she could hold up for my inspection. Like an obstetrician displaying a wet, red-faced baby.

She didn’t find it. Or maybe I didn’t want to look. But, either way, I was grateful for the effort, though not grateful enough to tell her so.

It was a little after eight when Marie finally left. I didn’t waste any time getting on the telephone. Bouton was due in an hour, and I wanted to finish my calls before she arrived. I began with Pooch, identifying myself and outlining the previous day’s events.

“Rehab?” he asked, the minute I paused for breath. “A fucking junkie whore? I bet she was a nigger, too. Am I right? Was she a nigger?”

“Look, Pooch, I’m just telling you what happened. So you can pass it on to Bowman. I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

“C’mon, Means, you must’a laughed. Don’t tell me you didn’t laugh.” He was clearly offended.

I was at a loss for an answer. On the one hand, I didn’t want to defend Vanessa Bouton’s flight of fancy. On the other, I didn’t want to come down to Pooch’s level, either. The fact that I wasn’t
painfully
conscious of my own race didn’t mean I looked into the bathroom mirror and saw a white man.

“Have you spoken to Chief Bowman yet?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.”

“What’d he say?”

“You wanna know exactly?”

“Just tell me, Pooch. I’m startin’ to lose my temper.”

“As near I can remember, what he said was, ‘That goddamned Cherokee’s no dumb injun.’”

I could still hear him laughing after I hung up, still hear him as I dialed Barry Millstein’s number at The House of Refuge. Millstein picked up on the fourth ring.

“Barry? It’s Roland Means.”

“Roland, how are you?”

“Pressed for time, Barry. I want to talk to you about Reese Montgomery, Thong’s last victim.” I quickly outlined my thoughts, emphasizing both the lack of a detailed history in the NYPD’s investigation and my theory that Montgomery had once run with a more affluent crowd.