Authors: Stephen Solomita
Kennedy was walking across the clearing when I raised my head. The noise of rushing water had covered the noise he made, just as the dark shadows had covered my own presence. He stopped near the van, then stared at the cabin as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to ambush me or flee while he had the chance. Either would have been better than what he actually did, which was turn to face in my direction. Without making any conscious decision to do so, I raised the rifle to my shoulder and shot him through the left kneecap.
He crashed to the ground, dropping the AK47 as he fell. I stood up, the .22 still against my shoulder, and began to walk toward him. He saw me, started to reach for his rifle, then looked back at me again.
“I don’t think you want to do
that,
” I said. “If you do
that,
I’ll have to kill you.”
He thought about it briefly, finally deciding that he didn’t want to do
that.
What he wanted to do was grab his knee and howl in pain. Which he did.
I retrieved the AK47 and threw it into the woods.
“Take off your jacket and throw it to me. I’m cold.”
“I’m bleeding,” he screamed, “I’m bleeding and my leg is broke.” His voice had the air of a petulant child. How could I do this to him? How could I be so cruel?
“If I was you, I’d take that jacket off right now. And I wouldn’t put my hands in the pockets, either.”
He managed to get the jacket off by rolling to his good side, then twisting out of it. When he tossed it to me, I put it on gratefully. My sweatshirt was soaked through, and I was very cold.
“Pull up your shirt and empty your pockets.”
“Why don’t you just put the cuffs on me? I’m unarmed and I’m not offering any resistance.”
“You in a hurry to get to jail, Kennedy? You ready to start your book?”
I wanted to shoot him so bad, I could taste it. I wanted to smell the copper smell of his life’s blood running out of his body, to see chunks of his brain glistening in the moonlight. I looked into his eyes and found them a faint gray-blue. So pale I could barely separate them from the surrounding whites.
“She’s still alive, you know. Lorraine. Your wife is dead, but Lorraine is still alive.”
I sat down on the damp grass, felt my legs almost groan with relief. Now that my adrenals had stopped pumping, I could feel the weariness begin to overtake my mind as it had already overtaken my body. I wasn’t going to make it down that mountain. It wasn’t in the script.
“I should have killed that bitch a long time ago.”
“Which one?”
He didn’t answer for a minute, then said, “I want a lawyer. I have a right to a lawyer.”
I managed to stagger to my feet and walk over to the van. The door was unlocked, the keys in the ignition. I pulled the keys, stuck them in my pocket, then turned on the headlights.
“Perfect, don’t you think? Bright lights are traditional for an interrogation.” I stumbled back to him, sat down a few feet away. I could see his eyes, now. They were flat and merciless, showing no emotion deeper than wary calculation.
“You can’t force me to confess. A coerced confession is useless in a courtroom. We’re both cops and we both know that.”
“Coerced? That’s a big word for a hillbilly cop. You must have learned it while you were in Albany. Not that it matters. This isn’t about a trial, Robert. You’ve already been convicted.”
“What are you gonna do, kill me?” He said it with a sneer; then the truth hit him.
It was almost funny. First, he did a double take worthy of Larry, Curly, and Moe. Then his lips tightened and his nostrils flared; pure animal rage danced in those colorless eyes. The jaws of a trap or a bullet in the knee—it was all the same. He was helpless; he’d lost control. I think he would have preferred the fires of hell.
Then, with no transition, the rage disappeared as if someone had thrown a switch. “I wounded ya, didn’t I? I knew I wounded ya. No way I could’ve missed. If you hadn’t moved at the last second, you’d be rat food.”
“Good for me; bad for you.”
He shifted his weight slightly, then grabbed his knee. The bottom half of his trouser leg was soaked with blood.
“If you’re gonna kill me, why don’t you just do it?”
“I’m waiting for my cue.”
“What?”
“Look around, Bobby. Quaint log cabin, babbling brook, moonlight on the maples—all ringed by the majesty of the Adirondack Mountains. What director could resist the location? For a final scene, of course. See, Bobby, it
has
to end here. There’s no other way it can happen.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. All the fuckin’ noise we made, there’s bound to be troopers waitin’ down at the house. Most likely, they’ll come in tomorrow on foot.” He sighed, shook his head as though resigned to the inevitable. Only his eyes betrayed the truth. He was simply waiting for his chance. Killing time while he searched for an opening. “But I had a good run. All these years? I knew they had to get me sooner or later. I mean what’re the odds of dyin’ at home if you’re in my line of work? I gotta admit, though, I wasn’t expectin’ no injun to track me down. It’s like outta the wild, wild west or somethin’.”
“Don’t forget the nigger.”
“Oh yeah, right. What’s her name again?”
“Vanessa Bouton.” The Anschutz felt like a bar of lead, as if I had ten-pound weights attached to my wrists. I wondered if Kennedy could read it. If he could
smell
it the way an animal smells weakness. He answered the question by leaning toward me, moving as slow and steady as a snake after a mouse. Too bad this mouse had a gun. I shot him in the left thigh, maybe six inches above his wounded knee.
He fell back, jerked himself, really, deliberately moving away from me. Looking for another few minutes of life, another chance to kill again. I listened to him yell, too far gone to feel much of anything. He thrashed on the ground, grunting, growling, screaming in a language beyond words. I’d once known a man who called himself a dog trainer. He’d start by visiting various dog pounds, looking for the biggest, meanest dogs he could find. Then he’d toss them in cages and poke at them with the end of a sharpened broomstick. Kennedy reminded me of one of those dogs, a huge shepherd-dane so lost in its hatred it saw the whole world as an opportunity for revenge.
“I won’t kill you quickly,” I said when he was calm enough to listen. “That’s not a way out for you.”
He pulled himself to a sitting position, fighting the pain. “What’s the point of this? I don’t get the fucking point.” Then he grinned suddenly, showing small even teeth. The smile was feral. “You wanna show me that you’re better, right? Better hunter; better killer. Right?”
I responded by changing the clip in the rifle. I did it carefully, partly because my hand was none too steady, and partly to show Kennedy that I wasn’t terribly interested in his opinion of me.
“You’re right and wrong, Robert. I’m the better hunter, but I knew that going in. You, on the other hand, are the better killer. How many did you get?”
“Thirty-one. Counting the faggots. I shouldn’t count them really. They were for the money. You know how much my father’s got socked away? Two million bucks. At least. Meanwhile I’m givin’ out parkin’ tickets on Main Street. It wasn’t right.”
“But you didn’t kill your father, Robert. You killed your brother.”
“I didn’t
have
to kill my father. Cancer was doin’ it for me. As for precious John-John. How does a cocksucker deserve to inherit a million dollars? Just tell me that.” Despite the obvious pain, Kennedy seemed anxious to talk. Maybe he knew that I had to listen. That listening was in the script. “In a way, I enjoyed pop-pin’ them homos. I mean about stalkin’ ’em, gettin’ ’em in the van without anybody seein’ us. It was like a challenge, because what I was used to was workin’ places where there was nobody to see what I was doin’. In New York, there’s always some asshole walkin’ down the street—you can’t get no privacy—so what I had to do was snatch them faggets in a way that witnesses wouldn’t remember it. Which I did and which makes me proud, but I also have to admit that the things I said to get the job done were purely disgusting.
‘“Well, what’d you have in mind, honey? What do you like to do?’
“I’d have Becky lyin’ there in a pair of goddamned split-crotch panties and I’d still have to spell out what I wanted to do. The poontang wasn’t good enough.
“‘What I wanna do, baby,’ I’d say, ‘is squeeze your pretty balls while you do her up. After that, we’ll improvise.’
“Word of God, buddy, it was like the old days on the Albany Vice Squad. You’re supposed to get them to make an explicit offer. Otherwise, it don’t stand up in court. Meanwhile, the whores know this, so they’re tryin’ to get you to tell ’em exactly what you want before they name a price. I didn’t mind playin’ that game with the bitches. That was more like natural. But when it came to the homos, I used to just bust ’em and lie about it in court.
“That’s where I fucked it up, right? The way I did the homos? I mean I read all the true crime books. About John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas and the Green River Killer. I
knew
I should’ve fucked those faggots. Or at least jerk off on ’em or something. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Bad enough I had’a let ’em screw my wife.
“Poor Becky. Started out a whore and ended up a whore. She didn’t mind, though. Not for that kind of money. And it was Becky that really got me going, anyway. When I come back from Albany? Man, I knew I’d had me a real close shave. All I wanted to do was lay back and do my job. Only Becky was a bi-sexual woman. Understand? She liked girls. Now, where you gonna find a broad in Owl Creek willin’ to sleep with a married woman and keep her mouth shut about it? Exactly nowhere. So why couldn’t Becky see that? Why’d she keep naggin’ at me? Tellin’ me how good it could be?
“Truth, man, thinkin’ about that stuff could get you real hot.
Real
hot. And I’d find myself thinkin’ about it till I was near about to bust my britches. Tryin’ to dream up a way we could do it and get away with it. I mean drivin’ around in a cruiser, I seen plenty of times I could’a grabbed a broad off the road and done whatever I wanted. No, the grabbin’ part would’a been no trouble at all, but what was I gonna do with ’em after I was finished?
That
was the problem.
“It was Becky said we should kill ’em. I swear it on the Bible. ‘Why, Daddy,’ she said, ‘all we have to do is leave the bodies in a place where nobody will ever find them.’
“So that’s how it started. Just practical, because there wasn’t no other way to do it if you wanted to have the sex, and that’s what we wanted. We’d find some lady broke down on the highway and I’d send Becky over to check it out. You know, see if she’s got help comin’ or if she’s got some kinda way to fight back or if she’s just too damn old and ugly … things like that. When Becky tossed me the high sign, I’d walk on over with my tool box, show ’em my badge, offer to give ’em a ride home. If they refused, why we’d just go on to the next one. Figurin’ even if they were suspicious, what could they say? But if they took us up on our offer, I’d walk ’em to the van, bang ’em on the head and shove ’em inside. By the time they figured out what was happening, it was all over but the shoutin’.
“Now, let me tell you something about killin’. In case you don’t already know it. Killin’ is like dope. The more you do, the more you want. First off, they’d be beggin’. ‘Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me.’ Only thing was I
liked
hurtin’ ’em, which was somethin’ I didn’t know when I started out. Later on they’d be sayin’, ‘Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.’ But, you know, I liked killin’ ’em, too. I liked drawin’ it out, takin’ my time, doin’ it
right.
Doin’ it till they said the magic words. ‘Kill me. Please kill me.’
“You know how many ways you could hurt a woman? How many ways you can think up if you put your mind to it? Afterwards, I’d be patrollin’ Main Street, givin’ out tickets, thinkin’, why didn’t I do this; why didn’t I try that. If I could’a got just a little more out of the bitch, it would’a been perfect.”
He lapsed into silence, then. As if he’d exhausted himself in an attempt to impress me. His face sagged into a puzzled frown, but his eyes retained their intensity. I wondered what he hoped to accomplish. Was he, for instance, after one last chance to kill before he was locked up forever? Because he’d been right when he said he was finished. We’d made enough noise to alert the whole county. The cops may have arrived late in the afternoon, may have decided it was too dangerous to hike into those woods after a man armed with an assault rifle, but they’d still be out there. Especially with Bouton asking questions and Kennedy, who was supposed to be on duty, among the missing.
“Tell me something, Robert,” I said. “When you do the book. Are you going to put in the part about killing your mother?”
“That was an accident.”
“How about having sex with your brother?”
His face tightened, but he held his tongue.
“Maybe you can explain it by claiming he seduced you. After all, he was twelve years old and you were what … eighteen? What eighteen-year-old could refuse the charms of a twelve-year-old boy?”
“That’s what he
liked
to do, all right? I was bein’
nice
to the little faggot.”
“Save it for the book, Robert. Right now, we have a little game to play. You like games, don’t you? Killing is a game for you, isn’t it? Like cat and mouse?” I gave him a chance to answer, but he chose to remain silent. He may not have known what was coming, but he knew I was finally getting down to it. “The name of this game is ‘You Bet Your Life.’ No, wait a minute. It’s called ‘We Bet Our Lives.’ We bet our lives that a blind woman named Lorraine Cho can make her way through a marsh, climb a steep hillside, find a road that’s little more than a worn track, hike back through a stream to your house, avoid two vicious dogs, find help, and get back here before we die. How do you like the sound of it?”
“You’re not gonna kill me, are you?”
“No, I’m not. But the rules of the game demand that I immobilize you. Turn around.”
“What’re you gonna do, cuff me?”