He laughs and hands the report back to me.
“My being on leave certainly hasn’t curtailed the excitement factor for you. Or your neighbors,” he says. “Shit, Riz. Someone got to the scumbag. Well, part of him, at least.”
The head in the box turned out to be Ruiz’s. Delivered to my door like an early Christmas present. He was identified by dental records provided by the Mexican authorities. Evidently, despite all of the Gypsy’s other character flaws, he took excellent care of his teeth. The mystery everyone was working to solve, besides where we might find the rest of the body—which could be ID’d, in part, by a large jaguar tattooed on the back of his left calf—was who Sergei’s deliveryman was.
The description Sergei gave was of a man over six feet tall, Caucasian, muscular in build, with bright red hair—in Sergei’s words, “Yeah, man, a fuckin’ ginger. With freckles and shit”—dressed in khaki pants and shirt, wearing a black ball cap with no insignia.
Forensics had provided the following: The rate of decay showed that death had occurred about four days before the head’s discovery. Which meant that Ruiz had been dead twenty-four hours before his head was delivered to my apartment. It had been severed from the torso cleanly (and, hopefully for the victim, postmortem) by a very sharp knife. There were, however, no bullet holes to the back of the head and no skull trauma, so, as there was no complete body to autopsy, no clear cause of death could be ascertained. Like with Lana, both ears had been removed.
The box was a plain, generic cardboard box, sixteen by twelve by twelve inches, thoughtfully lined with plastic wrap to catch most if not all of the leaking liquids. The box was addressed, in neat block letters with a medium black ballpoint pen, to me.
Another interesting bit of forensics that Maclin shared with me was the confirmation that a section of Lana’s hair had been cut off just above the scalp. The bit of hair below the cut was dyed a bright scarlet.
“There’s one more thing,” I tell Seth. “In one of Lana’s hands they found a few strands of human hair, follicles intact. So she did put up a struggle. Tests show that the hair’s human, and red. Not dyed red like Lana’s missing hair, but a natural red.”
“Like the delivery guy’s,” he says, eyes coming to rest on my hair. “Or yours. That’s interesting.”
“Maclin told me that his partner, Tate, threw a fit getting the news, thinking that I had somehow polluted the crime scene. But I gave a sample and it wasn’t a match. Of course, there’s no way to know right now if the crime scene hair came from a male, but it had to come from someone strong enough to hold Lana down while slitting her throat.
“The description of our delivery guy makes him big enough to do the job. He certainly does not match the typical cartel enforcer, though. Not unless the Irish mafia is moving into the Texas drug trade.”
Finished with the Popsicle, Seth places the stick on the coffee table and wipes his hands on the blanket. “So, following the timeline,” he begins, marking the days off on his fingers, “Ruiz, driving Lana’s car, is in Weatherford, a week ago today. The car is found and there’s the Mexican standoff with the boys in gray. Then for a few days Ruiz is missing, unaccounted for. Ruiz is killed on or about last Thursday; his head is delivered to you in the box on Friday. Sergei steals the box that day and it sits in his nice, warm closet ripening for three days. On Monday morning, Sergei’s mom finds the package and El Gitano is unveiled. Did the kid ID any photos?”
“No positive ID,” I say, remembering Sergei’s running commentary on the mug shots, looking to get a rise out of us by conjecturing at length on the crimes each prospect had committed. I make a face. “How does a fourteen-year-old know so much about sheep shagging?”
“Internet,” Seth answers readily. He shifts on the sofa to find a more comfortable position and then stares thoughtfully out the window while I check my text messages.
I really don’t like hovering over Jackie, but she keeps forgetting to check in and it’s making me worried, which is tipping me into being irritable and testy. Sleep has been in short supply, and the dark hours have been spent nervously imagining scenarios of Jackie being stalked by a maniacal carrottop in the hospital’s underground parking garage.
I decide it’s time to go, but I hear Seth muttering something.
“What?” I ask, looking up from my phone.
“You said Irish mafia before. These murders don’t feel like Mexican cartel. But who’s crazy enough, or connected enough, to kill and mangle a big-time dealer’s girlfriend and the dealer and then put his head in a box and leave it at a cop’s door? And what’s the message? ‘Back off’? A Wes Craven–style thank-you for getting rid of the competition?”
“Whoever he is, he’s still walking around somewhere. Taylor’s got some extra patrolmen near our apartment for a few days just in case.”
“We found a lot of meth crystal in Bender’s house,” he says.
“And…”
“And despite Bender’s wanting a higher class of customer with cocaine, he had his fingers in the meth business for years, and it made him a boatload of money. The Mexican cartel has been looking for ways to get into that trade for a long time. Maybe Bender’s old associates didn’t like his new partners.”
“See, this is why I miss you, Dutton. It just so happens I’ve got Ryan running a check on North Texas meth dealers matching the description of our delivery guy.”
Seth nods, satisfied. “I’m so ready to be off this sofa. I need to be back at work.”
I stand up and stretch, returning the phone to my pocket. “Give it some time. I don’t want you splitting your stitches all over the car.”
“Craddock tells me they’re making you pair up with Ryan while I’m out,” Seth says. “Poor guy.”
The front door opens and a lithe young woman in gym clothes enters the foyer carrying Seth’s poodle.
She calls out, “Hey, sugar buns, I’m back.”
The girl walks into the living room but startles when she sees me standing next to the couch. The workout gear she’s wearing is the kind of cheap stuff you’d pick up in a teen shop even though she’s well past her high-school years. The heavy eye makeup, only partially covering the fading remnants of a black eye, and synthetic hair extensions scream a decade of bad choices and elusive luck.
She puts a hand on one hip; her brows come together with displeasure.
“Hey,” Seth says. “This is my work partner, Detective Riz.”
I give her a friendly nod.
Immediately, her posture relaxes. The relief of something not being what it looks like is palpable. She exhales, and smiles. The lovely Shawna gives a wave before taking the dog into the kitchen.
I grin at Seth and whisper, “You’re not just rescuing pups these days, are you?”
I bend down, kiss him fondly on the forehead. “Just don’t forget who got you that extra-large DQ, sugar buns.”
Seth snorts. “And you just be careful, partner. Don’t be accepting any more mystery packages.”
16
Talking heads. Two of them. Lana’s and Ruiz’s severed heads on my kitchen counter, their mouths opening and closing like large bass. But there’re no sounds coming from the rubbery blue lips. Their eyes are closed, which somehow makes the dream worse. In the fogged reasoning of my sleeping state, I think that if I could see their eyes, I’d know what they were trying to tell me. I hear Uncle Benny’s voice asking me if I’m done Reaping the Grim. Then he tells me to wake up.
I come to full awareness sitting upright in bed, sour sweat misting my arms and legs, breathing like a collapsed marathoner. Jackie stirs and turns over but continues sleeping.
The nightstand clock reads 4:38 a.m. There’s no use trying to get back to sleep, so I get out of bed, my heart hammering, and put on my running shoes. After slipping my iPod with headphones into my arm holster, I take my SIG nine out of the bedside drawer and walk quietly into the living room to look through the peephole at the front door. I unlock both locks and ease the d
oor open for a quick scan of the breezeway. It’s empty, no one on the stairs, no sounds coming from any of my neighbors. I return the gun to the drawer, watching Jackie breathing deeply and peacefully beneath the sheets.
After softly closing and locking the door behind me, I walk out onto the street. The sky overhead is a dark, translucent blue, the moon half full, a few of the brightest stars still showing. The evening patrol cars assigned by Sergeant Taylor—one parked in front of the apartment, one at the rear entry of the building—would have left at four. Jackie and I have two more days of taxpayer-paid protection and then we’re on our own, the rationale being that if the deliveryman was going to return, he would do it within the first week of leaving the box at our door.
The air is actually cool, and I debate returning to the apartment for a sweatshirt, but I decide the chill will help quicken my pace. Walking briskly for a couple of minutes, I tie my hair up off my neck with a band and begin the music feed through the iPod. First, the Breeders and Veruca Salt to warm up. Then I quicken my pace with the group Go Betty Go, and finally pound into a steady, loping stride with Metric.
All the gold and the guns and the girls could never get you off…
I halt for an instant before choosing the path into the park next to the local community college. I’ve never hesitated taking the park route before—although I usually run it in full daylight—and so I veer onto the path precisely because of the electric frisson of fear that has caused me to reach for the Saint Michael’s medallion tucked snugly beneath my already-damp-with-sweat T-shirt.
I know a lot of cops and civilians, including the Texas state governor, who run with their pistols clipped to their waistbands. But if I’m running where I think I might need a gun, then I’m probably going to be in trouble before I can unclip it and fire, and I need to pick a different route. Runner muggings and assaults often come from behind; an arm around the throat, a blow to the head, and down you go. If someone thinks taking on an almost-six-foot-tall blazing harpy with legs like steel-belted radials who’s clocking on average seven-minute miles is a good idea, he’s certainly welcome to try.
It’s two miles to the college, three miles around it, two miles back to the apartment. An easy run. If I keep up my current rhythm, I’ll be home about the time Jackie wakes up.
The chorus of the Metric song fades out and I’m running under large oak trees lining the path, the shadows blackening to bottomless pools along the college track. A new song begins, “Outlaw” by the Sounds, and I have to smile. Jackie put together the playlist for me for my running time. She knows me so well.
It’s an hour to sunrise, and yet there’s already a brightening in the air, only Venus left glowing in the proximity of the moon. The hangover from the dream is fading, but Benny’s voice is clear: Are you done Reaping the Grim?
It was an expression he had coined during his time as a sergeant in the Homicide division of the Ninety-Fourth Precinct, Brooklyn. The meaning was that, unless you were a psychopath, there were consequences to witnessing the effects of bloody violence, and in order to stay sane, a human being had to expel the outrage of unnatural death or the horror would turn cancerous, eating its host. It didn’t matter if the exhalation of poisonous thoughts was in the form of perverted jokes (the sicker the better), angry ranting, or confused, despondent wailing. The point was to get it out.
My uncle’s form of cop therapy occurred at Donovan’s, a Brooklyn bar over a century old, perpetually murky and cavernous. A collective of off-duty cops from several precincts standing on shaved cedar below a begrimed tin roof, half-empty Jameson bottles lining the mahogany bar, a thick bank of cigarette smoke engulfing everything, served as comrades to the beleaguered and witnesses to the ritual. Irish, Polish, Italian, it didn’t matter.
Benny would stand toe-to-toe in front of the traumatized officer fresh from a murder scene. The victim’s body was perhaps yet warm, just a short, but irreparable, distance from being someone’s father or husband or son, the corpse pulpy and distended by a stabbing or a bludgeoning or a shooting. Benny would clasp both hands firmly behind the officer’s neck, pull him so close that their foreheads were touching, and ask, demand, “Are you ready to reap some grim?”
The brotherhood around them like a wall would chant, “Sick it up, sick it up,” until the troubled officer could begin the healing. Sometimes the officer screamed while describing the crime scene, pumping his fists in futile anger, a string of obscenities flowing unchecked. The verbal expulsions were like a mop and a pail of ammonia water, cleaning the gore off the kitchen tiles.
Occasionally, the besieged man would abandon all pride and weep like a baby. Once, a cop balled up his fist and gave Benny an uppercut to the jaw, knocking him senseless to the floor.
The worst for most of them was the homicide of a female, usually the result of a “domestic dispute,” a euphemism for some twisted perv’s crushing the life out of the woman who’d likely given birth to his children.
Reaping the Grim in Donovan’s tavern was the stuff of cop legends. A secret club where only the most trusted were included, and you had to be asked to join—didn’t matter how many years you had put into the force. Afterward, there was no lingering shame, no calling out, and no repeating what had gone on while Benny worked his magic. Ever.
Although it was never documented, it was a widely held belief that Benny’s cops had the lowest rate of burnout, the least amount of sick days, the fewest number of suicides and domestic incidences of any precinct in a fifty-mile radius.
There were never any women at these sessions. I wouldn’t have heard about them, even after I joined the force, if Benny hadn’t described them to me. Benny always said that the officers you had to worry about were the ones who pretended the carnage didn’t bother them. Like my father, who stuffed down every recoiling reflex and wounded thought as an exercise in strength, sealing the canister of rage with more and more alcohol until he ended up reenacting the very things he worked to contain. No surprise that my father died of cancer of the gut.
Of course, Benny died of cancer too. But it was honestly gotten, smoking a pack of Winstons a day for thirty years. His gut, and his conscience, stayed clear to the day he died.
Soon after I joined the force, he counseled me to find my own way to expunge the dark chaos. Running like my life depended on it became my reaping, where all the spiked thoughts growing in my head could be cut down to a manageable size.
The ending song on the iPod is another pounding, fast-paced anthem, and I hit the last quarter-mile stretch before leaving the park.
The lane of sheltering trees ends and the looping path becomes brighter. On the grassy lawn of the campus ahead is a grayish sphere, a weathered soccer ball, perhaps. But it’s the wrong color and texture; it’s mottled and banded—fleshy, even. The size of a small head.
“Jesus…” I pitch and roll away from the path, crab-crawl on the ground to get some distance between myself and the object, my eyes jerking from side to side, looking for any movement from another human form along the lawn. I know I don’t have my gun, but I instinctively reach for it anyway, my breath high and whistling through my windpipe. I press my belly farther onto the grass, trying to tamp down the panic.
The rounded shape has begun to quiver as in a high wind, but there’s absolutely no breeze, and I stop breathing entirely.
A pointed snout and ears rear up from the leathery mound, along with a long, scaly tail, and the creature shuffles away from me like a miniature primordial tank.
“A fucking armadillo?” I yell. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…”
I roll over onto my back and howl with laughter until my pulse stops racing. Anyone seeing an armadillo for the first time, especially a city-bred Yankee, will have two immediate reactions: revulsion, and disbelief that something alive and well during the dinosaur age is still trotting around suburban lawns. Looking, under the right circumstances, like a warty, bald head.
After brushing the grass off the seat of
my shorts, and grateful no one was around to witness the embarrassing exhibition, I continue my run back to the apartment.
I have to stop twice more—bent, hands on knees—to cackle hysterically over what an ass I can be.
17
The night-light shines in the breezeway, dispelling any lingering shadows in the hall and around the door, and I lean against the wall, kicking off my running shoes. I open both locks with my two keys and slip into the apartment, listening for the sounds of Jackie stirring. All is quiet, so I decide to take a shower first before turning on the grinder for the coffeemaker.
I peel off wet clothes on the way to the bathroom, smiling, thinking how Jackie will laugh when I recount my armadillo adventure.
Or maybe not. Maybe my running through a darkened campus, alone, will not be thought of as humorous, so I decide that for now I’ll just tell Seth and fill Jackie in later, when we’ve had more time and distance from the last mortal remains of El Gitano.
I turn on the water, let it run until it’s hot and steaming, and then step into the stall.
The Ruiz case is closed for the time being. Ryan and I will be meeting with the sergeant first thing about a new drug operation: finding a cheese-heroin dealer to several North Texas high schools, cheese being a blend of black-tar Mexican heroin and over-the-counter cold medication popular with teens. Two seventeen-year-old students died last week, the overdoses immediately following an early school dismissal. Both students were champion wrestlers headed for full scholarships at Harvard. Nothing like a couple of deceased Caucasian star athletes to get City Hall’s attention.
Ryan has such a baby face that I can easily imagine Taylor embedding him undercover in the school as the new senior transfer from some Texas hamlet like Nacogdoches. Or, as Seth calls it, Nack-a-Nowhere.
I hear the outer bathroom door opening and I tense reflexively, soapy hair falling in dense waves, blanketing my face. “Hello?” I call out, trying to clear the shampoo from my eyes.