Waltz of Shadows Read online

  Way we planned to do it was like this: We’d wait until the Doc left the house early morning to go down to the park to saddle up Big Tits, and since he always left the back door unlocked, we’d slip inside and wait for him. Jump him and talk our trash. Try to keep it quiet like, so as to keep the Mrs. out of it. But Dave said, she heard us, then too bad. We’d bring her into the business too. We figured she wasn’t going to go all to pieces we threatened to show her some photos we didn’t have of Doc dropping his goober in Big Tits. Pretty obvious she and the Doc weren’t cozy, but it was also pretty obvious she wasn’t squawking all that much about the arrangement, long as he was discreet. But word got out he was doing what he was doing, the local Baptists who hadn’t been caught in someone’s bed could cause repercussions, could affect her meal ticket.

  Night before it all went down, we quit following the Doc. We felt we knew his agenda. We went over to Dave’s place and got drunk and toasted one another. About midnight, me and Sharon went back to her place, tried to make love, but she was too drunk, and finally passed out.

  I did too. For a while. But it didn’t last. Normally I get drunk like that, I sleep like the dead, wake up with a head the size of the panhandle, only with a crack in it. But this time I woke up about three a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep and my head didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel drunk and I didn’t feel hung over. I felt frightened.

  I didn’t go to bed that night or the next day. I felt like I’d never sleep again, and wouldn’t need to. I was running on high octane.

  The night came to do it, we put on gloves and dark clothes, but nothing cute like black wool hats and blackened faces. We drove over to Dave’s in my car. We bagged up some rope and tape. Dave got his automatic and pushed a clip into it.

  Things had changed again. I didn’t like that. I told him if he were going to take it, he ought to take it unloaded, use it as a bluff. But he wouldn’t do it. Said if he talked to this guy like he was going to shoot him, he had to believe he had something to shoot him with. The method acting approach.

  We waited unt SWe had il the Doc normally went down to the park, then we drove over to the University lot and parked, got our bag of rope and tape and a flashlight, crossed the highway, walked along the border of the woods, up to the Doc’s property. It was bright enough we didn’t have to turn the flashlight on at all.

  We weren’t too worried about anyone seeing us. All the houses up there are large and on big tracts of land, so we didn’t have to go across anyone’s yard to get to the Doc’s place, and the angle of attack we were taking didn’t make us highly visible.

  We eased along the ridge where the hill dropped down into the Doc’s private park. We stopped and listened. We didn’t hear him and Big Tits down there, but we didn’t worry about it. We knew his schedule. They were probably just getting started, groping each other under a blanket. We went on ahead to Doc’s back door and Dave tried it. It was locked.

  We didn’t know what to do. We’d planned everything down to the last detail, and now this. The Doc had changed his plans this night after being consistent for so many, and we didn’t have a backup plan. We stood there like idiots, trying to figure what to do next.

  There was a scream from inside. It was short and ended almost before it started, but there was no doubt that a scream was what it was. Dave pulled his automatic out from under his sweater and looked at us and we looked at him.

  I guess we stood there a full minute, looking at each other’s hangdog faces in the moonlight, not knowing what to do.

  Suddenly, the door opened and a man was standing there looking at us. He was as startled as we were. He was real tall and broad shouldered and pale skinned and his head was shaved and there was a gold and blue tattoo that ran up from under his blue wind-breaker and along his neck and the side of his face and draped over his head. It was the tattoo of a cobra rising up to strike, and its fanned head terminated at the top of the guy’s bald head. We could smell the guy. He had a stink clung to him like glue.

  Dave jerked up his automatic and Cobra Man reached out with a gloved mitt and grabbed the automatic and twisted it out of Dave’s hands and slapped him across the forehead with the grip. This took the guy less effort than it takes to wipe your ass.

  Dave went to his knees. A trickle of blood streamed from under his hair and down in front of his ear. In the moonlight and the soft light from inside the house, it looked like a stream of lube oil.

  Cobra Man lifted his other hand and showed us he had a silenced .38 automatic in it. He smiled some gold ridged teeth at us and said, “Come on in, cousins. Good to see you.”

  His breath went along with his body odor. It came out of his mouth with his oily voice and caressed us. Garlic would have smelled like a breath mint compared to that shit. Bob got Dave by the arm and helped him up. Dave held his head with one hand and looked wobbly. We all stood in our huddle for a moment, not moving. “I invited you in, cousins, and I meant it,” Cobra Man said. He was pointing both guns at us now.

  One by one, we went inside and stood in the foyer, which was about the size of a mobile home Mom and I once lived in. It was partially lit by warm ceiling lights, and the floor was blue and white tile made up like a giant chessboard, and it Sboae live wasn’t our move.

  End of the foyer was a huge grandfather clock, and you could hear it ticking softly, like the beating of a heart, but not fast enough to match the beating of my heart. The house was full of Cobra Man’s stench.

  The fat guy who had swapped envelopes with the Doc came out of a room unscrewing a silencer from an automatic pistol. There was a Polaroid camera on a strap around his neck. He wore soft, thin gloves. He looked at us and started screwing the silencer back on. He looked at Cobra Man, said, “What the fuck’s this?”

  “Visitors,” Cobra Man said. “They were at the back door. Tricker-treatin’ early, I reckon.” Cobra Man smiled like he was really funny.

  The fat man came down the foyer and stood in front of us. He looked at Carrie and Sharon for quite a while. Sharon especially. “Who the fuck are you people?” he said to no one in particular.

  Nobody answered.

  “You guys were going to rob the place, weren’t you?” the fat man said, then laughed. “Well, you picked a bad night for it, little partners. A hell of a bad night. All you peckerheads into the room there.”

  We went into the nearest room after Cobra Man went ahead of us and turned on the light. It was a big room with a fireplace large enough to cook a steer in and white curtains over windows the size of ping pong tables. The center of the room had one of those long conference style tables. So long, you sat at one end and wanted to talk to someone at the far end, you’d have to have had a megaphone. Maybe give them a telephone call.

  Cobra Man motioned for us to sit on the couch, and we did, our knees and elbows close together, like kids waiting for detention. The sweat started rolling out from under my arms like someone had turned on a faucet.

  “What you want to do with them, Fat Boy?” Cobra Man asked.

  “I’m thinking on it,” Fat Boy said.

  “I think we ought to do something with this nice pussy here before we do something else,” Cobra Man said. “The guys I don’t care what you do, though you want to be consistent, I’ll fuck them too, provided their buttholes’ll stretch enough to take the old snake.”

  “That kind of thing’s your department,” Fat Boy said. “I don’t want anything like that with any guys. We do something else here, it could screw things up. I think we got to take ’em out of here before you can do what you want, then you and me got to do what we got to do.”

  I knew then, I didn’t try something, it was all over. I panicked. I hopped up and ran and palmed myself onto the long table in the center of the room and dove right into one of the big windows with the white curtains. The jump was close. I just barely made the window.

  Hitting those thick curtains and getting wound up in them was what saved me from getting cut really bad. I struck the ground r
olling and twisted out of the curtains and started up running, tripped, went down, then something went by my ear like a bee, and then I was dipping down toward the woods and the Doc’s park.

  As I got into the pines there, Spinowaa piece of bark jumped off a tree next to me and puffed in all directions, then I was down the hill and tripping over a stone seat, tumbling into the creek. I waded on across and started running through the woods.

  Behind me, I could hear someone coming, and I knew without looking it was Cobra Man. He had followed me through the busted out window.

  I ducked and weaved under branches and jumped over bushes and briars, hoping if he got off another shot, I’d be a hard target to nail. One thing in my favor was he didn’t seem too good at hitting what he aimed at.

  If he fired again, I never knew it. Few moments later I was out of the woods and stumbling onto the highway, not even looking for cars. One went by me and swerved and honked and someone screamed “Motherfucker,” but I was across the highway then, running like hell into the University parking lot.

  I didn’t have Dave’s car keys, of course, so I kept running. Across the lot and down into the stretch of woods that grows on either side of Morgan Creek. I went along the creek a while and finally stopped to listen. I didn’t hear anyone following, but I didn’t come out. I laid down in the leaves and tried to be quiet and think.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t broken any law, really. I hadn’t busted into the Doc’s house. We had been let inside by a man with a gun.

  What was the deal?

  What was the fat man, Fat Boy, the other called him, doing there?

  Who had screamed?

  What in the hell had happened to Doc’s schedule?

  And the others, Sharon, the Disaster Club, what was to become of them?

  No answers came to me. I lay there and felt the water that had splashed on my legs turn cold. Where I had banged the stone seat with my shin ached like hell. I felt like a coward, running like that, but what else could I do? I figured what Fat Boy had in mind was going to be unpleasant, and had I hesitated one moment longer, I felt certain I would have found out how unpleasant. There wouldn’t have been any getting away.

  Finally, couple hours later is my guess, I got my nerve up. I went along the bank where the creek travels through the heart of the University, under the bridge and along these deep concrete channels the city put in for flood control. I came out on the other side of the University and started walking home. I guess I had been down there on the creek bank for a couple of hours, maybe longer, scared, not knowing what to do. I figured now the thing to do was get home and call the cops.

  I wasn’t very far from my place by then, and I started walking home. You haven’t seen this place, Uncle Hank, but it’s not the Ritz. It’s over by the University and I moved there when I started school. It’s down in the one area over there hasn’t been upgraded. There’s about six streets with rows of ramshackle, slumlord houses on either side, and one of those dumps is mine. There’s one street light at either end of the street, so unless you’re under one of those lights, or you have a porch light on, way all those oaks and elms along there droop, you won’t see much.

  I got to my street and started down it. Dogs ba Sn iyou’re rked at me along the way, and a goddamn bat swooped down on my hair and scared the hell out of me. Time I got to my walk, I was a bundle of raw nerves. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw Fat Boy or Cobra Man. My empty carport was full of shadows and all of them looked like people with guns.

  But there wasn’t anyone. I got my key from under the steps and unlocked the door and slipped inside, still trying to figure what to do next, and it was while I was figuring that the smell hit me. The stink of Cobra Man. I tried to back out of there, but I went back too fast and slipped and fell. I tried to get up and my hand went into something wet. I lifted it to look, saw what I had slipped in.

  Blood.

  Then, between my bloody fingers, very close to me, I saw a face, eyes poking out of its head like a couple of golf balls with pupils painted on them. A tongue hung way out of its mouth and the teeth were clamped through it. I jerked my hand out of the way for a better look.

  It was Dave.

  I jumped up and skidded and fell back against the wall and stood there looking at Dave, smelling the blood on me and the sour stink of Cobra Man. I wanted to turn and dart outside, but I didn’t. All the noise I’d made, slipping and falling, it came to me that if Cobra Man or Fat Boy were in the house, they’d have been all over me. And with the front door open, the air had cleared out some of the stink. With that diluted, I felt stronger. I began to believe I was the only living thing in the house.

  I slipped into the kitchen for a better look at Dave. He was lying on his stomach and he wasn’t wearing any pants. I could see the tip of an Old Hickory butcher knife hilt sticking out of his ass. He’d been sodomized with it. That’s where all the blood had come from. The knife belonged to me.

  There was a coat hanger twisted around his neck so tight most of it wasn’t visible. One of his legs was cocked at the knee, the foot pointing at the ceiling. The other was stretched out on the floor, straight and stiff.

  I had a feeling with all his talk about fear and dying, this hadn’t been what Dave had in mind. I think he expected something a little more noble; something not smelling of blood and shit.

  Trembling, I went over to the open knife drawer and got another Old Hickory knife, eased around and looked in the living room.

  Everything appeared okay, but it was dark enough in there to make me uncertain. I let my eyes adjust until I felt secure no one was hiding and waiting for me. Not that there were many places anyone could hide, small as the room was, and the only major pieces of furniture were a stuffed chair, a television set, and a couch with its back pushed flush against the wall.

  I went in and looked around and didn’t see anybody, which of course is what I was pretty assured of, or I wouldn’t have gone in there.

  The back door that led out of the living room and onto the little back porch was wide open and there was only the screen door between the room and the night. That door wasn’t much when it was locked. You leaned into it and picked up some, the latch would pop and you could come in. It was a strange time to worry about it, but I remember thinking to myself, after tonight I was going to get some kind of deadbolt and s Seadsn’ome latches for the windows.

  I went over for a look through the screen door. The moonlight was falling over the tiny overgrown lawn and there was a dark-haired tomcat sitting on the wooden fence that bordered my yard and the neighbor’s, sitting there with one leg lifted, licking his balls.

  I gingerly opened the screen door and went onto the back porch, jumping a little as the boards squeaked beneath my feet and the cat leapt with a surprised yowl into my neighbor’s yard. A dog barked. The cat hissed, and then the dog barked several times, moving away, pursuing the cat, I presumed. Finally, there was only the sound of crickets in the grass.

  I went out and stood in the yard and sucked in some of the night air. It was so cold and clean it almost made me drunk. My wet pants legs felt cold as ice.

  I went back in the house and noticed for the first time that there was a thin sliver of light slipping out from under my bedroom door and out of a needle thin crack where the door was pushed slightly open. I had concentrated on that open back door so hard, I hadn’t noticed it.

  The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I squeezed the handle of the butcher knife so hard I felt it ridge into the palm of my hand, but I couldn’t let go. I kept squeezing, causing a slight cramp to run up my wrist and forearm.

  Guess I felt like I had been such a coward before, I wanted to prove myself. Or to be more truthful, fearful as I felt, I didn’t believe anyone was in the house. It seemed obvious to me they had come in by springing the back door, and had brought Dave inside and killed him in the kitchen, which gave me an idea about what I’d find in the bedroom.

  I touched the bedroom door
and eased it open, stood in the doorway looking at an image in the corner of my dresser mirror. The image of a naked body standing very still. Or I thought it was standing. Another look showed it was hanging from a chinning bar I kept mounted between the frame of my doorless closet. It was a woman.

  Her legs weren’t touching the floor. They seemed to be cut off at the knee.

  I took in a breath and caught the fading odor of Cobra Man and another odor I didn’t like. I went in, looking in the direction of the reflection.

  It was Carrie. Her legs had been pulled up and tied behind her and there was a coat hanger twisted around her neck and there were great strips of hair missing from her bloody scalp. The hair had been ripped out, and the tool for the ripping, a pair of pliers from my kitchen drawer, lay on the floor beneath her. Coat hangers had been taken out of the closet, straightened and inserted into her mouth at the edges of a cloth gag, and into her ears, nostrils, the corners of her eyes, her ass and vagina. Her face was spattered with blood. Her legs were coated with shit.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something behind the open bedroom door. I looked. Sitting naked, against the wall, hands pulled behind his back, was Bob. He had a wet spot between his legs and his dick and balls hung out of his mouth. He had a startled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe how things had turned out.

  I turned around slowly, not wanting to, having some idea of what I would find, and what I expected was there.

  Sharon was on the bed, spread-eagled, ankles and wrists tied up in strips of sheet and fastened to the bed post. Her eyes were wide open and her pink panties were stuffed in her mouth. She had a bullet hole between her eyes. The pillow her head rested on was dark with blood. Her breasts and belly were covered with blue-black spots. Her pubic thatch was no longer blond. It was rich with blood. There was a car battery on the floor and a pair of jumper cables and a pan of water with a wet towel beside it.

  That explained the spots on her body. She had been touched up with water and the bastards had fastened the cables to her and given her the juice. At the foot of the bed, between her legs, was an empty soda pop bottle covered in blood, the Polaroid camera Fat Boy had worn around his neck, and an open book—the photo album I showed you.