Bad Men

“As we speak.”

  “You should have gotten Willard to do it. He never liked Verso.”

  “I never liked him either, but I didn’t dislike the man enough to sic Willard on him. You see what he did to the woman? He cut on her pretty bad.”

  “Before or after?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Then I’m not planning on asking either.”

  “Me, I figure before.”

  “Is this conversation leading somewhere, Dexter?”

  “Take a look at the newspaper. It’s somewhere back there.”

  Moloch, seated in the semidarkness at the back of the van, checked among the boxes and drapes until he found the newspaper. Its front-page story detailed the discovery of four bodies in a house south of Broughton.

  Four bodies—three male, one female—and two heads—one male, one female—in the refrigerator. One female body, minus a head, remained unaccounted for.

  “It’s all over the TV too. Way I figure it, Willard was probably holed up there for a time. You can bet your last nickel that somebody saw him around there and pretty soon his face is going to be plastered right up there beside yours. He’s getting worse.”

  In the darkness of the van, Dexter heard Moloch sigh regretfully.

  “You’re saying he’s a liability.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Then I must be a liability too.”

  Dexter glanced back at him.

  “You’re the reason we’re here. Willard ain’t.”

  It was some minutes before Moloch spoke again from behind Dexter.

  “Keep a close eye on him, but do nothing for now.”

  Man, thought Dexter, I been keeping a close eye on him since the first time I met him.

  Powell was dozing, and there was no conversation between Braun and Willard in the van behind. That suited Braun just fine. Unlike Dexter, the redheaded man didn’t have too much against Willard. He just figured him for another one of Moloch’s crazies, but that didn’t mean he wanted to talk to him more than was absolutely necessary. Of the five people who now accompanied Moloch north, Braun was probably the closest to being a regular guy. Although a killer, he, like Shepherd, did not favor unnecessary violence, and had willingly acceded to their request to watch the road while they disposed of the investigators. Braun was in it for the money: he was a good wheel man, a reliable operator. He stayed calm, even in the worst situations. Every group needed its Braun.

  Braun just wanted his share of the cash. He figured that some people were going to get hurt in the process, but that was nothing to do with him. That was down to Moloch. Braun would quite happily have walked away without hurting anyone as long as the money was in his hand, but Leonie and Dexter and Willard and the others needed more than that. They liked a little action. He looked over at Willard, but the boy’s attention was elsewhere, his gaze fixed on the road. Braun didn’t mind the silence, just as he didn’t mind Willard.

  Still, he patted the hilt of the knife that lay along the edge of his thigh, and felt a small surge of reassurance.

  Braun didn’t mind Willard, but he sure as hell didn’t trust him either.

  Braun was smarter than any of them.

  Willard stared at the blacktop passing beneath them, and thought of the woman. It had taken her a long time to stop screaming after the man had died. She had tried to start the car, and had almost succeeded before Willard got to the window and broke it with the blade of the machete. When he took the car keys in his fingers and yanked them from the ignition, something faded in the woman’s eyes. It was the death of hope, and though she started pleading then, she knew it was all over.

  Willard had shushed her.

  “I ain’t going to hurt you,” he had told her. “I promise. Just you calm down now. I ain’t going to hurt you at all.”

  The woman was crying, snot and tears dribbling down her chin. She was begging him, the words almost indistinguishable. Willard had shown her the machete then, had allowed her to see him tossing it away.

  “Come on now,” he said. “See, you got nothing to be scared about.”

  And she had wanted to believe him. She had wanted to believe him so badly that she allowed herself to do so, and she had permitted him to take her hand and help her from the car. He had turned her away from the remains of the man—“You don’t have to see that”—as he led her toward the house, but something about that gaping doorway, and the blackness within, had set her off again. She tried to run and Willard had to tackle her and take her down by holding on to her legs. He let her scream as he hauled her toward the house by the legs, her nails breaking as she tried to get a grip on the dirt. There was nobody to hear her. Willard cast a longing glance over at the machete lying in the grass. It was his favorite. He could always go back and get it later, he thought.

  And he had lots of other toys inside.

  Shepherd saw the pizza-delivery car first. The Saturn had a big plastic slice strapped to the roof, like a shark fin. Shepherd hoped the guy was making a lot in tips, because the job didn’t come with a whole heap of dignity. He started the van and pulled in alongside the kid as he retrieved the pizza boxes from the insulated bag on the backseat. He heard the back of the van open and pulled his ski mask down over his head. Seconds later, Tell, his face also concealed by a mask, forced the kid into the van at gunpoint. There were no other people in the parking lot of the motel.

  “Look, man,” said the kid, “I don’t carry more than ten bucks in change.”

  “Take off your jacket,” said Tell.

  The kid did as he was told, handing it over to Tell. Shepherd leaned across the bench seats at the front of the van and tapped the kid on the shoulder with his gun.

  “You stay there and you keep quiet. My friend is going to deliver your pizza for you. After that, we’re gonna drive away from here. We’ll drop you off along the way. It’s up to you if you walk out, or we dump what’s left of you. Understand?”

  The kid nodded.

  “You go to college?” asked Shepherd.

  The kid nodded again.

  “Figures. You’re smart.”

  The van door closed, leaving them alone together. Tell, now wearing the kid’s red Pizza Heaven jacket, climbed the stairs to the second floor of the motel and knocked on the door. He pulled the ski mask from his face and waited.

  “Who is it?” said a voice.

  “Pizza,” said Tell.

  He saw a face at the window as the curtain moved, then the door opened. There was a guy in a white shirt and red tie standing before him. Behind him was a tall white man with receding hair and a beer gut.

  “What do we owe you?” said the DA’s investigator as Tell reached a hand into the insulated bag.

  “For Mr. Verso,” said Tell, “it’s on the house.”

  The bottom of the bag exploded and the investigator staggered backward. Tell’s second shot sent him sprawling across the bed. Verso tried to run for the bathroom, but Tell shot him in the back before he got to the door, then stood over him and fired two shots into the back of his head. He fired one more into the man on the bed, then walked swiftly back down to the van. Shepherd started it as soon as Tell reached the door.

  “Your mask,” he said.

  “Shit.” Tell pulled it back down before he climbed in. Behind him, the pizza-delivery guy sat with his knees drawn up to his chin.

  “You okay?” asked Tell.

  “Yeah,” said the kid.

  “You did good,” said Tell. “You got nothing to worry about. Put this on your head.”

  He handed the insulated bag to the kid, who did as he was told. They drove back onto the highway, then pulled over at a deserted rest stop. Tell opened the back door and helped the kid over to one of the wooden picnic benches.

  “There’s a phone to your right. I was you, I wouldn’t use it for about another twenty minutes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You breathing okay under that thing?”

  “I’m fine.”
r />   “Good.”

  “Mister?” said the kid.

  “Yeah.”

  “Please don’t kill me.”

  As Shepherd had noted, the kid was smart. Tell raised the silenced pistol and pointed it at the insulated bag.

  “I won’t,” he said as he pulled the trigger.

  They bought hamburgers at a fast-food joint off exit 122, and ate them seated in the back of the van while they waited for Shepherd and Tell to join them. They were avoiding toll booths and were sticking to the speed limits. In the back of the van, Moloch had clipped his hair, shaved his beard, and now wore a pair of blackrimmed glasses. His driver’s license claimed that he was John R. Oster of Lancaster, Ohio.

  “How much longer?” Moloch asked.

  “Hour, maybe,” said Dexter. “We can rest up then.”

  Moloch shook his head. “We move on. They’re already looking for me, and pretty soon my picture will be on every TV station from here to Canada. We need to find her, and find her fast.”

  Despite what he said, he wasn’t too concerned yet. He had sometimes spoken of Mexico as his preferred final destination in the event of an escape from custody, because Mexico, following a decision by the Mexican Supreme Court that life sentences breached a constitutional article that stated all men were capable of being rehabilitated, would not extradite Americans facing life sentences. Moloch didn’t believe that for one moment, but he figured that there would be those in the prison population who would recall his comments and who would pass them on. It would not be enough to prevent checks to the north and west as well as to the south, but he hoped that it might force the police to concentrate their efforts on monitoring the southern routes.

  He sat back in the van and closed his eyes. He was strong, and he had a purpose. He allowed himself to drift into sleep, and dreamed of a woman.

  A woman dying.

  Chapter Four

  Danny was pleading.

  “Mom, just ten more minutes. Five more minutes. Please!”

  Marianne peered at him from over the rim of her glasses. Danny was in his pajamas, which was something, but it had taken her an hour to convince him to do even that. He seemed to have grown up so much in the last year, and she was beginning to find him more and more difficult to handle. He was always questioning, always doubting, testing the limits of her authority in every little thing. But that incident with the bird had thrown him, exposing his vulnerability and drawing him back to her for a time, his head pressed against her breasts as he cried over—

  Over what? Over the fact that Joe Dupree had been forced to kill the dying bird with his bare hands to put it out of its misery, or because Danny hadn’t been allowed to touch it, to play with it first? Danny sometimes hurt creatures: she had watched him do it, had caught him burning ants with a piece of broken bottle or tormenting cats by flinging stones at them. She supposed that a lot of boys behaved that way, not fully understanding the pain that they were causing. In that, maybe Danny was just being a typical six-year-old. She hoped so. She didn’t like to think that it might be something deeper, something that he had picked up from his father, some faulty gene transmitted from generation to generation that would manifest itself in increasingly vicious ways as he grew older. She did not like to think of her Danny—because he was her Danny, make no mistake about that—becoming such a man.

  And he was asking questions now, questions about him, and it bothered her that the lies she was forced to tell Danny caused him pain. Danny seemed to have vague memories of his father, and he cried when she told him that he was dead. Not the first time, curiously, but rather on the second occasion, as if it had taken him the intervening days to absorb the information and to come to terms with what it meant to him and for him.

  How did he die?

  A car accident.

  Where?

  In Florida.

  Why was he in Florida?

  He was working there.

  What did he work at?

  He sold things.

  What things?

  Misery. Pain. Fear.

  He sold cars.

  Is he buried, like the people in the graveyard?

  Yes, he’s buried.

  Can we visit him?

  Someday.

  Someday. Just as someday she would be forced to tell him the truth, but not now. There would be time enough for anger and hurt and blame in the years to come. For now, he was her Danny and she would protect him from the past and from the mistakes that his mother had made. She reached out to him and ruffled his hair, but he seemed to take her gesture for one of acquiescence and bounced back to his perch on the couch.

  “No, Danny, no more. You go to bed.”

  “Mom.”

  “No! You go to bed now, Danny Elliot. Don’t make me get up from this seat.”

  Danny gave her his most poisonous look, then stomped away. She could hear him all the way up the stairs, and then his bedroom door slammed and his bed protested as he threw the full weight of his tantrum upon it.

  She let out a deep breath and removed her glasses. Her hands were trembling. Perhaps it was surprising that Danny was as well adjusted as he was, given the lifestyle that he had been forced to lead. For the first two and a half years they had stayed on the road, never remaining long in any place, crisscrossing the country in an effort to stay ahead of any pursuers. Those years had been hellish. They seemed to coalesce into a constant blur of small towns and unfamiliar cities, like a movie screened slightly out of focus. The early months were the hardest. She would wake to every floorboard squeak, every rustle of trash on the street, every tapping of branches upon the window. Even the sound of the AC clicking on in cheap motel rooms would cause her to wake in a panic.

  But the worst times came when car headlights swept across the room in the dead of night and she heard the sound of male voices. Sometimes they would laugh and she would relax a little. It was the quiet ones she feared because she knew that when they came for her, they would do so silently, giving her no time to react, no time to flee.

  Finally she and Danny had arrived here, settling in the last place that they would look, for she had spoken so often about the West Coast, about a place with year-round sunshine and beaches for Danny. She had meant it too. It had long been her dream that they would settle at last out there, but it was not to be. She feared the ones who were looking for her (for they were surely looking, even after all this time) so much that the entire West Coast was not big enough to hide her. Instead, she had retreated to cold and to winter darkness, and to a community that would act as an early-warning system for her if they came.

  She looked to the refrigerator, where she still had a bottle of unopened wine in case one of her new friends called and offered to curl up in front of the TV for an evening of comedies and talk shows. She so wanted to open it now, to take a single glass, but she needed to keep her head clear. On the kitchen table before her were spread the household accounts, abandoned since the previous night in the hope that a little sleep might make them less forbidding. She wasn’t earning enough from her job at the Casco Bay Market to cover her expenses, and Sam Tucker had already asked her to stay home for the rest of the week, promising to make up the hours within the month. That meant that she would either have to look for another job, possibly in Portland—and that was assuming that she could find a job and someone to baby-sit Danny after school or in the evenings—or she could dip back into the “special fund.” That would necessitate a trip to the mainland, and the mainland always made her nervous. Even the larger banks were a risk: she had already dispersed the funds into accounts in five different banks over three counties—no more than $7,000 in each account—but she was always worried about the IRS or some strange bank inspector of whom nobody had ever heard spotting the connections. Then she would be in real trouble.

  And there was the fact that she didn’t like using the money. It was tainted. Wherever possible, she tried to get by on what she earned. Increasingly, that was becoming harder and h
arder to do. True, there was the knapsack itself, hidden among boxes and spare suitcases in the attic, but she had vowed not to touch that. There was always the chance of succumbing to temptation, of taking out too much and giving Danny and herself some treats, thereby drawing attention to herself. This was a small community, and even though Mainers didn’t go interfering in each other’s business, that didn’t mean that they weren’t curious about that business to begin with. It was the downside of living in such a comparatively isolated community, but a sacrifice worth making.

  There was also the fact that the money was their escape fund, should she and Danny ever need to move on again quickly. If she began dipping into it for little things, there was the danger that she would come to take its contents for granted, and the little dips would become big dips, and pretty soon the fund would be gone.

  And yet there was so much money in it, so much: nearly $800,000. How bad could it hurt to take a little, to buy a decent television, some new clothes, maybe even the game console that Danny wanted? Such small things from so much…

  She forced the temptation away. No, a bank trip was the only option. She folded her glasses and put them back in their case, then began to gather the papers together.

  She was almost done when the knock came on the door.

  It had been decided that Leonie would knock. Anyone looking out would see an attractive black woman, smiling brightly. She could pose no threat.

  Leonie heard footsteps coming toward the door, and a curtain moved aside in the semidarkness. She smiled in an embarrassed way, and raised the map that she held in her hands. Hey, I’m lost, and it’s a cold night. Help me out here. Tell me where I went wrong, huh? She didn’t even glance to her left, where Dexter stood holding a gun by his thigh, Braun behind him, or to her right, where the boy-man Willard waited, unblinking, his left hand shielding the blade of the knife in case a porch light caught it and drew attention to them. Moloch had remained apart, for the time being, with Shepherd, Powell, and Tell.