*
He missed it on the first pass because, ironically, someone had knocked the mailman’s mailbox off the post. The drive was unkempt and overgrown enough for someone who’d gone missing, but he still couldn’t see any house from here. Arnold kicked around for a couple of minutes in a vague circumference five feet either side of the drive before he found the mailbox and when he did he actually laughed. Something he’d never considered before. Did mailmen actually need mailboxes? It seemed a little foolish. Why not just pick up their mail at the post hub where they worked? Seemed reasonable enough, but he didn’t know; maybe they worked in different area codes or zones or whatever the fuck it was they called em. Still, it was a little funny. He bent to his knee and pulled the box from where it’d fallen in a tangle of blackberry vines. Something skittered out from underneath and he let it fall, starting back on his heels. Grass snake, his mind tried, though a darker part of his soul suggested something more lethal…a cottonmouth, for instance, a timber rattler. Regardless, it was gone. Don’t be so sure, the voice persisted. Don’t forget what’s got you out here on this wildfuckinggoose chase to begin with. Put your head up your ass and you’re like as not to make it home tonight…
He tried to clear his mind. Looked back down at the mailbox and saw it’d fallen on its other side when he dropped it. Mr. Johnson’s name was clearly embossed in neat white letters against a black background. “There you are,” he said, trying to get back to business. It wasn’t like him to go woolgathering on assignment. That’s the kind of shit that ended you up in the hospital. Or worse, the fucking graveyard.
He stood up to his full six one. Hitched his pants a little higher, mainly to brush his hand reassuringly against the butt of the Colt. Walked back to where his car waited in the shade of the drive. He didn’t need a map to tell him where he was; just through those trees a couple of miles would be the edge of Leszno’s Acres. He felt his flesh goosebump and was immediately, savagely, disappointed with himself. “Get your fucking shit together, man,” he spat into the insect-filled chatter. The admonition served to steel his nerves. He climbed in behind the wheel of the Crown Vic and put it in gear.
The drive was a multiple winding S, this winding enforced by gigantic trees in scattered formation. The forest undergrowth, straining for the light the driveway afforded, had thrown long, green arms out from both sides, as if in a race for the middle. Arnold looked, rumpled his brow, and stopped the car. “Just a second,” he said and got out. He walked to the front of the car and swiveled his head to see if he was right. Yes indeed, right there. He walked over to the broken vine and took it in his fingers. Sap was still collecting at the broken end. He looked down between his feet and saw the tire tracks. “Sonofabitch,” he said, dropping to one knee. “Yep.” He put a finger to his lip and glanced over his shoulder. There hadn’t been any tire tracks back there. He’d looked. But here they were just as plain as the nose on his face. “Umm hmm,” he muttered thinking about the mailbox in a different light. Somebody had rubbed away the tracks up near the road, probably the same sonofabitch who’d broken down the mailbox.
He stood and peered deeper down the way. Just to the left was the slope of a roof, its line unmistakable in the foliage. He decided to leave the car and go the rest of the way on foot. He pushed back his jacket so the butt of the Colt hooked it. Started walking after taking the keys from the ignition and closing the door.
A minute later he came to the clearing. It was a big oval, obviously cut years before. The modest frame house had seen its best years but it still bore the touch of livability. He walked the dusty path up to the front porch and paused to test the wind, his nose doing little rabbit movements. Yeah, there it was again. He’d thought he caught a whiff before the clearing but out here in the open it was unmistakable. The smell of death, rot. He looked at the house suspiciously. Put his hand back to the Colt. Walked up to the first step. He noticed the insect chatter had died down this close to the house and filed it away for later. His flesh had started to goosebump again.
“Hello?” he called for no good reason. Waited a minute. There was no answer. Not surprising. He went up the three steps to the porch and looked around. A rocker and swing at one end. A small iron holder for firewood near the door. Other than that, nothing. The front door was closed, locked, he presumed. He went to it and tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand and he pushed the door back.
The smell was heavier here.
He pulled the Colt from the holster and entered cautiously. Left the door open as he moved farther into the gloom. The room was sparsely furnished: a small television, a chair in front of it several feet away. Against the far wall a threadbare couch. Curtains hanging closed on the windows. Through an alcove he could see a refrigerator, still humming faintly. Strange, the electricity, he thought. He pushed through the entrance and regarded the kitchen. It was a complement to the other room, spartan, clean, with only a thin sheen of dust. A table with one chair sat dead center. The counters and sink, empty. He moved back into the room he’d first entered. Thought about trying the lights and then decided not to. Toward the back wall there was another entrance to a hallway. It would lead back to the bedrooms. He crossed the space and looked down its short length. It was darker here, the smell larger. He looked down at the gun again. Put his hand over his nose to stifle the smell.
The first door on the right was a bedroom, the door missing, though the hinges were still in place. Again, the economy of furniture mimicked the rest of the house. A bed before a curtained window, a small chair on the other wall with a mailman’s uniform laid across it. An ageless bureau with a cloudy mirror. That and the oppressive smell.
He wrinkled his nose and backed out into the hallway. Two more doors and the hall ended in a window, it, like its predecessors, heavily curtained. The stoutest piece of furniture, a thick, high-legged chair, sat directly before it. He found nothing in the bathroom, less in the other bedroom, the latter really only a closet for a clutter of old junk. But still the smell.
And then his eye had it. In the ceiling, about halfway down near the first bedroom, was a heavy eye-bolt screw. Arnold walked up until he stood directly beneath it. He reached up and put his middle finger through the eyelet and pulled down gingerly. The door gave a bit and he came out from underneath. Pulled with one hand while training the Colt into the yawning darkness that unfolded as the door swung down. There was no ladder, but the smell was like a heavy wet blanket of corruption. He fetched a well-used handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his face. His eye happened to fall back on the chair at the end of the hall.
He was just getting ready to retrieve it when he heard a set of loud thumps from outside.
Footsteps. On the porch.
Then breaking glass.
He left the attic door hanging and edged back down the hallway toward the front door, the Colt in a two-fisted upright grip. He stayed quiet, not willing to give whoever was out there an idea of where he was. He reached the entrance to the den and peeked around the doorjamb. Broken glass was scattered along the floor near the windows that looked out to the porch. Nothing appeared to have been thrown through, or at least nothing he could see. He eased across the den, fanning the gun slowly left and right, following with his eyes. Then to the front door. He took his left hand off the gun and turned the doorknob, got into position, and flung it back to the wall, barreling outside in the same motion, clocking left and then spinning back right, his finger tight on the trigger.
No one.
But there were huge, muddy bootprints all over the stoop and up and down the porch. Where the window was busted hung a rotted strip of material, dripping foul brown water. Keeping his back to the wall, Arnold edged over to get a better look, counting off the seconds in his head as a little trick for sharpened concentration. He ripped the fabric free and held it out for a better look. It seemed to be a strip of old shirt or pants leg but it was so old and dirty he couldn’t be sure. “What the fuck?” he whispered, dropping it
to the dirty porch. Because now there was a different smell. Swampy. He squinted and moved toward the stoop.
Crack!
The sound came from around the back of the house, right side. Like a big limb falling. Something forcing its way through a thick tangle of underbrush. “Halt Motherfucker!” he yelled, breaking for the corner of the house. A second later he went down on one knee and back to the two-fisted grip, fanning the area with the Colt. About twenty yards deep in the bracken, away through a vast knot of undergrowth and hanging vines something was bulling through. The sun afforded him slight glimpses of the form, shaggy, human-like, bent over and trudging forward like a person moving against a high wind.
“Motherfucker I Said Stop!” Arnold yelled again. The figure ranged ahead, disappeared into thicker foliage. Arnold fired the gun once into the air, the noise shocking and final in the quiet afternoon. To no effect. The sonofabitch was getting away. “Goddammit!” Arnold shouted, jumping off the porch and skirting the edge of the clearing, straining into the underbrush to get a clear view of the stranger. To get a clear shot. Nothing. The figure had gone too deep. And there was no trail, no fucking trail at all. Not through there. He could still hear the sound of the man’s escape, but getting fainter now.
The sonofabitch was getting away!
Arnold sprinted farther to the right, thinking a shadow there was a break in the forest, but it wasn’t much. No trail, anyway. He shook his head and gritted his teeth. “Motherfucker,” he spat again. Hunched his shoulders and bulled into the thick foliage himself.
It only took about five minutes for him to lose everything. The figure, his sense of direction. He stopped in a wild tangle of vines he’d managed to pull around him in his bullheadedness and cursed prodigiously. Sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, his clothes a ragged mess. The adrenaline that had pushed him forward now cramping his muscles, making him realize the futility of his situation. He wasn’t gonna find a motherfucking soul out here. Shit, he’d be lucky now to find his own way out.
Maybe that was the plan from the start, a bastard voice whispered in his mind.
“No goddammit, I don’t think so,” he said though he hardly believed it. He shook his head and wiped at the sweat. Looked up for the sun but the canopy was too thick overhead. Shook his head again and let fly another string of invectives. Realized that if it was a trap he’d fallen in without a second thought. Couldn’t justify his training with reality. “Okay, fucker,” he said. “Time to use your head.” He found a stout branch at his feet and picked it up, determined to bludgeon his way through.
Which is exactly what he did for the next fifteen minutes.
And then, unexpectedly, he came to a dirt trail. Double-rutted so that a car or truck could pass along, though he couldn’t imagine why, this far on the ass-end of Nowhere. He began to walk in the direction he thought would bring him to the road. Almost too tired to care about the figure that’d got him out here in the first place.
Coming around a curve between two enormous white oaks he saw the car. Skate’s. It came like a cold splash of water in a drunk’s face. For a second he thought he was hallucinating, and was only convinced of the truth, when he walked up and put his hand on the cool hood of the BMW. “Well fuck me running,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder, suddenly caught in the midst of an eerie chill.
He’d thought he would find something out here, but this wasn’t what he expected. He walked slowly around the vehicle looking for signs of an accident. The car was dirty, but other than that, unharmed. Then the reality hit him again: Carolyn Skate was dead. The woman he’d once made love to on her office couch was dead. The car confirmed it. He shook his head and looked off into the underbrush again. It was quiet. Too quiet. He sucked air through his teeth and walked over to the driver’s side door. Used the handkerchief to open it because he knew the dusting crew would be all over this thing just as soon as he reported it.
If you report it.
He stopped cold, wondering where the random thought had come from. Because of course he’d report it; he was a cop. This was obviously a crime scene…
He tried to concentrate. Leaned in to see if he could find anything useful and that’s when he saw it. A blood splash on the lower panel of the car door. He wasn’t surprised but it did drive the point home. Skate was dead. Someone had killed her and driven her car out here where no one would look. Except someone did. And what was the only connection between these pieces? That goddamn neighborhood. Somehow it all came from there.
He turned away from the car and saw the figure.
It was standing about twenty yards away within a ring of trees, just off the path. Looking his way. Arnold’s reaction was immediate.
“Motherfucker Step Out Of The Trees With Your Hands Up!” He planted both feet squarely and trained the wide bore of the Colt on the unresponsive stranger. “Motherfucker I’m Gonna Shoot You If You Don’t Get Your Motherfucking Hands In The Air! Now Motherfucker!” The figure remained hunched and dull. Arnold pulled the trigger and a large chunk of bark exploded from the tree closest to the figure and rained down in pieces all around it. Arnold heard a loud grunt, like a boar’s, amid the ringing in his ears, and the figure lurched out onto the path. A sudden, nauseating stench washed over Arnold, bringing tears to his eyes. The figure wavered in the film. Took another step forward.
“Okay,” he said and pulled the trigger for the third time that day. The shot took the stranger in the shoulder and spun him around to fetch up against the massive trunk of a nearby cypress. It grunted again but made no other sound. It didn’t go down either. Arnold watched as it peeled itself from the tree trunk, his brow furrowed in consternation when he saw no blood. Not a single drop. He paused for a moment, looking down the pistol barrel, not quite sure to believe what he was seeing. The steel jackets he had in the Colt could punch a hole in an engine block. They could kill a fucking elephant. The figure took another step his direction and Arnold shot it directly in the chest.
The blast raised the figure off its feet and violently backward, his ass kicking up a cloud of dust when it landed. But it still didn’t go all the way down. It just sat there in the dust, its feet splayed out in front of it with a gaping hole in its chest and its eyes never wavering from the man with the gun. Arnold felt his testicles draw up and an ice-water chill envelope him.
He fired again and this time the shot sheared off the left side of the thing’s head, the red, baleful eye on that side suddenly extinguished. Ten feet away Arnold saw a piece of skull attached to a drift of matted hair come to a rolling stop in the dust.
The figure began to stir and just as suddenly sat up. The head looked like a large ice cream scoop had lifted most of it away. But the sonofabitch was getting back up! Even now it was scrabbling to its feet, the one good eye blazing hate in Arnold’s direction.
The detective began backing up.