Homicide My Own (19 page)

We both stuck on heads over the counter and looked inside. Tagged hunting knives and a cheap .22 revolver, a broken longnecked Bud bottle with dried blood on the business end of it, a pint of Kessler’s, half full, a baggie of grass, a set of skeleton keys, some phoney drivers licenses, and one disconcerting glass eye which seemed to look at us accusingly.

“What are you looking for?” we heard behind us. The chief, of course.

We turned but we didn’t say anything, enjoying a little stare-down instead.

“Your prisoner looks healthy,” he said finally.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said I. “But we’ll let a psychiatrist decide.”

“Why are you still on the island, and what are you doing here?” he asked. A threat had entered his voice. Da frick.

“They wanted to look at our goodie box,” said Robert. “Not much to see.”

“We were looking for a blue notebook,” I said, “a blue notebook belonging to a school girl, which seems to be missing, and we were wondering if maybe you had it.”

“Why would we have it?”

“Whether
you
had it,” I said, and there was a pretty good threat in my voice too, because I don’t take threats well, unless, of course, they come from the lieutenant, and then I take them very well. “But I guess if
you
had it you wouldn’t hide it in the goodie box.”

“I wouldn’t hide it anywhere, because I don’t have it.”

“The kids used to tease you,” said Odd, falling back into that dreamy way he had when he was flashing back. “They’d call you Bony Pony, because you were so skinny, all skin and bones.”

The chief looked for a moment as though someone had taken a ballpeen hammer to his heart. Robert suppressed a snigger, still not beyond the stage where he couldn’t appreciate a good burn at someone else’s expense.

“Come back to my office,” said the chief to us. “Robert, put their prisoner in the lockup.”

Knowing Houser was going back to where he gnawed open a vein, and seeing his reaction to same, made me want to get comfortable with the chief and spend some quality time. Who knew if Houser would draw any time in Spokane? He might as well draw a little here.

The chief shut the door behind us in his little office. We all sat down, the chief behind his desk. “I think it’s time you tell me what’s going on here,” he said.

“I think you know what’s going on here,” said Odd. “That’s why you’ve been following us, just like you dogged me when you were a little guy, Bony Pony, and I was Jeannie, the girl of your dreams.”

This was a man who could hold his mud, anyone could tell, and had been doing same all of his days, but I saw before me a shaky mountain about to slide.

“I don’t know how you know what you know,” he said, “but I am a Christian, and I know we don’t come back, we go to heaven or hell. Jeannie is an angel now. She was an angel here on earth, and now she’s an angel in heaven.”

“I’m a Christian too,” I said, “a hard-kneed Catholic, but even the Pope leaves a door or two open, and now that I think about it, we salute a good miracle. You may be a God-fearing Christian, but your people not so long ago used to send their souls to trees and winds and eagles flying across the sky. Who’s to say they were wrong? The angel has come home again, buddy, in the form of this big Swede. You see his big right hand? Well, Jeannie’s gonna lift that hand and point the finger at someone. You were twelve years old. Whatever they could have done to you then, they can’t ever do to you now. Get it off you, Chief, before you have to live all over again, and who’re you gonna be then?”

Whatever unraveling he was in the middle of came back together again in an instant, in his anger. I don’t know what lit him up worse, my accusing him of murder, or my shaking his comfortable concept of heaven and hell.

“
Me?
You think I killed James and Jeannie. I
worshipped
her. I thought she was the finest thing nature ever made. I was twelve years old! All I wanted to do was be around her.”

“You were jealous of James. He had her and you wanted her. Yes, you were twelve, crazy, no controls on yourself. You picked up the family shotgun, you knew where they would be that night, your folks thought you were snug in your little bed, but you were hiking up to that lovers lane carrying your shotgun! James was not going to have her, was he!”

“I’m gonna knock you on your ass, I don’t care if you are a woman!”

We were both on our feet, but forget about me backing down. “Who’s holdin’ you back, Tonto? Take your best shot.”

Odd said in a soft voice, “He’s not the one.” I guess I heard him or I wouldn’t be able to tell it now, but it was lost in the heat of facing down the chief. I wanted a killer, and quick, so I could get off this damn island and take my prisoner with me.

“You had a connection to Jeannie,” I yelled at him, “a powerful one, why didn’t you tell us?”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

“James rolled down the window to you!” I yelled in his face. “Why wouldn’t he? Bony Pony?”

“I cried for three days! You ever see an Indian cry? No one saw me either, you fuck!”

I was startled, I admit. Somehow I knew this man had said fuck maybe three times in his adult life and never in front of a woman, but he was right in front of me, six inches from my nose, calling me a fuck.

“He’s not the one,” Odd said, and before either of us could say anything else, we heard a frightened yell from Robert, “Chief! Chief, oh, shit! Oh, shit, shit, shit! Chief!”

We rushed to the adjoining door, threw it open. Houser was richocetting off the walls and bars of his cell, splattering blood everywhere. His face was dripping with it. The son of a bitch was chomping on his last good wrist.

16.

It was one in the morning by the time we got back to the Honeymoon Cottage, and I needed to sleep.

We rolled over the gravel, and in the quiet night, I thought we must be waking up half of Canada. We helped Houser out of the car. I hissed, “Asshole.”

“You shouldn’t have put me in that cell,” he whined.

Both the chief and Odd had struggled to hold him down, while Robert was running amok trying to find their first aid kit. I remembered the half full pint of Kessler’s in the evidence box and grabbed that instead. I squeezed between the two men, cleared a field for Houser’s bleeding wrist and poured most of the cheap whiskey over his wound. The rest I poured into his mouth. Choking it down had a calming effect on the toothy creep.

“No, Robert shouldn’t’ve took off your cuffs, da frick. What the hell was he thinking?”

Which was one of the questions, one of the several questions I hollered at Robert, while we checked Houser’s cleaned-up wound, which was ugly as rot but no more than superficial. Why in the hell did you take off the cuffs? I hollered at him.
How
in the hell did you take off the cuffs? They had keys too, you know, he told me, quite defensively, and one of them fit our cuffs, so why shouldn’t the poor guy be a little comfortable in the lock-up? He never did anything to Robert, after all.

Now our perv had both wrists bandaged up and I was fretting over a fresh round of fevers and puking.

“You
will
not get sick all over again,” I said. “There is no place for you to get sick, and no one to take care of you if you do…so don’t.”

He looked up at me with a hang-dog face.

We pulled him up on the porch and opened the door. Stacey and her mother were asleep in the bed. Gwen’s head lifted to watch us come inside, but the kid never did stir. Gone to dreamland.

The door locked from inside.

We made a pallet on the kitchen floor for Houser and lay him down. I cuffed his one hand to an exposed pipe and the other to some cabinetry. It was not the most comfortable position in which to try to get a night’s sleep, but we were not going to take any chances on him cannibalizing himself again. If he were up to it and had the necessary dexterity, let him chew on an ankle. Da frick.

We turned out the lights and Odd and I undressed in the dark, down to our skivvies. I lay down on the davvy and pulled the bedspread over me. Odd pulled a blanket over himself on the rocking chair.

“I’m dead,” I whispered.

“It’s been a long day,” said Odd.

“You know what we kinda lost sight of, in all the shit that’s happened?”

“Ron,” he said.

“Yeah, Ron. Who is he? Where is he? Is he on the island, even? How do we find him?”

“Maybe he’ll find us, if he’s still alive and on the island. We’ve made ourselves known.”

“Odd…how long can this go on? We’ve had our overnighter, I’ve gone along with that, and, yeah, I’m convinced. You’ve been recycled, and for maybe the best of all reasons. But at some point soon we’ve got to deliver our prisoner…or call someone else to come get him and quit our jobs and just live here.”

“You don’t have to be involved. I told you.”

“I’ve been wondering about that.”

“It’s not your thing, Quinn. You don’t have to go through this with me.”

I didn’t, of course. I was fully capable of throwing the perv in the backseat and driving alone to Spokane. I knew I wouldn’t.

“You and me don’t have that much in common, Odd. After we’re both cops, there’s not much to say.”

Which he didn’t.

“So why is it,” I asked, “we’re here together? Why is it we always wind up buddying up?”

“Not always.”

“Think about it.”

“It’s a small department.”

“Who’s your best friend, then, in the department?”

“In the department? I guess you are.”

“Now, isn’t that strange, because I would say the same thing, if somebody asked me.”

“What’s so strange about it?”

“You’re a young guy, I’m a woman almost twenty years older. I’m half a couple, you’re a loner. I’ve never been to your place, you’ve never been to mine. You don’t talk, I can’t stop. You’re a Protestant, I’m a Catholic.”

“I don’t see how that makes much difference.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t think we ever realized what friends we were ‘til we came to this island. I’m wondering…if you had a life before, maybe I did too, and maybe we were buddies back then, all the way down the line. Now, this ain’t coming from the head, it’s coming from the gut, and lately I don’t trust my visceral turmoils…”

“Your what?”

“I haven’t trusted my gut for some time, but I’m lying here thinking, whatever you do, I gotta stay and do it with you. That’s what I did before, and that’s what I gotta do again…and again…and again. Whatever happens to you has to happen to me. That’s why I have to stay, even though I don’t want to. This thing…we do it together, we always have.”

“What thing?” he asked.

“Die,” I said. And then I fell asleep.

I could have slept a little longer. I would not have minded an hour or two more of sleep. Up to me, I would have slept the rest of the day away, but at seven in the morning there was a rap on the door. Not a Frank or Angie rap. A rap lacking politeness. A rap I recognized even though I was still half asleep, having perfected the technique myself. A cop’s rap.

I sat up and gathered the bedspread around me. I was light in the head and may have been a little grogsick from last night’s beers and martinis.

“I’ll get it,” said Odd. He took the few steps to the door in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, and I looked at his legs. He had great legs, lightly feathered with silky blond hair, and an oval birthmark on the back side of his right knee. I remembered having noticed it before, during volleyball, when I played in the back row and Odd was in the front.