Leather Maiden

  “Goddamnit, Booger, what was that about?”

  “Sorry,” Booger said, “I just got bored.”

  41

  When Booger slapped Gregore awake, the bastard began to chatter like a squirrel. There was no information he wanted to hold back; he was ready to tell us everything, including potty-training problems he’d had as a kid. I didn’t blame him for being so informative. Besides the slapping, Booger had done some things with his pocketknife that had to hurt and had given Gregore’s ears that look hunting hounds get after a number of vicious encounters with coons in the wild.

  Even though he was open with his answers, Booger didn’t think he was quick enough or giving us enough of the answers we needed, so he took about ten minutes to beat him savagely with the phone book.

  I had to go stand behind the car again. When the beating was over, I went back and Booger put Gregore in the chair again and I asked the questions I needed answers to the most.

  I got them: Stitch and Caroline were well into their game, and the end of it was the assassination of Judence by Stitch. Dinkins was paying for the assassination to take place.

  Way they had it fixed was they blackmailed all of the history teachers to not be in their offices that day. It was not an unknown custom for the professors to watch events in the plaza from their offices above. They were to be out. That was the request. It was a simple request. Vacate your offices on that day and don’t come back and we don’t show the DVDs of you humping Caroline. In fact, you stay out of your offices and meet at the old sawmill grounds with a thousand each, the DVDs will be returned and it’ll all be over.

  It had a kind of poetry about it. Of course, I had the DVDs. Or at least some copies of them. There may have been more. I wanted to ask that, but Gregore, he was on a roll and I didn’t want to interrupt him. In the meantime, while the history teachers were out, thinking they were going to be paying off and getting the DVDs back, Stitch would show up in the history department dressed as a janitor, pushing a trash cart. He knew what to wear, and how to look and act like a janitor.

  In Stitch’s trash cart would be a high-powered rifle. He would pick an office lock and go to the window and crank the old-fashioned thing open. He would point the gun and pick Judence out when he stood up to make his speech, and kill him. One shot, one kill.

  Across the way was part two. I was going to be punished for meddling. Not by killing me, but by killing Belinda. The gears on the clock tower would do it. The minute the tower struck ten, Stitch would shoot, and Belinda would die. If there was some delay on the part of Judence, the plan would mutate.

  “How will she die?” I said.

  Gregore shook his head. When he did, blood and sweat flew off. His voice had turned raw. “I don’t know. I don’t have those details and don’t want them. I just know she’s supposed to die at ten. That way, when Judence is shot with a silenced gun, they’ll be trying to figure what happened, and in the meantime Stitch will go down the stairs and out the back way, and the girl will be dead in the tower. And after all the Judence stuff calms down, someone will go inside the clock tower, for maintenance maybe, and there will be the girl. Something extra, Caroline called it.”

  “How do they get in the clock tower?” I said. “Won’t there be guards around for Judence’s speech?”

  It was starting to be work for our boy. His voice sounded as if someone had used sandpaper on his vocal cords. “Some, but they won’t be concentrating on the clock tower; this isn’t a town with a real SWAT team or any kind of cops that matter. If there are guards there, Caroline, she’s not afraid to do what she thinks needs to be done. If they have to, she and Stitch will change plans. They’re versatile. They’re proud of it.”

  “Shit, you’re one of them,” Booger said. “How proud are you?”

  Gregore looked at Booger, fearing this was a trick question. “I’m not that proud,” he said.

  “That’s good,” Booger said, giving him a gentle pat. “Otherwise I’d have to knock some pride out of you.”

  “I’m just getting paid,” Gregore said.

  Booger grinned at him. That alone made Gregore wince.

  “So what about the clock tower?” I asked.

  It was obvious that he was starting to wear down, but the way Booger looked at him gave him strength. He said, “Caroline will be wearing what looks like a janitor’s uniform. She will be pushing a trash cart, same as Stitch. But in her cart will be Belinda, drugged. She’ll work the lock. She knows how. She’ll go inside the tower with the cart. That’s when she’ll do whatever it is she plans to do to Belinda. Skin her most likely. They drugged the others and started in on them alive. Had rubber balls in their mouths, scarves tied over those for gags. I saw them do the Ronnie girl. It was really horrible. They eviscerated them so they wouldn’t smell so bad and put them in the freezer and poured salt over them. They were alive when they went to work. Man. Ronnie, such a pretty girl. And even as the skin came off her skull, her eyes—they looked so big without the skin—there was still hope in them. And then Caroline pulled her eyes out with pliers, said she didn’t want them looking at her.”

  “You sonofabitches,” I said. “Don’t tell me any more about it. Don’t tell me one little thing more.”

  “I’m interested,” Booger said.

  “For Christ sakes, Booger,” I said.

  “All right, all right,” Booger said. “Want me to hit him some more? Just for fun this time?”

  “No. It’s time to tell the cops, stop this whole thing.”

  “Well, you can do that, but that means we got some explaining to do,” Booger said. “I’m not much wanting to get in the middle of this thing that way. I’ll go to the wall for you, brother, but I don’t want to go to jail. Torture, it’s frowned on. It upsets some people’s stomachs.”

  “Mine among them,” I said.

  “Hell,” Gregore said. “You ought to be on this side of it.”

  “You get us in the middle of it,” Booger said to me, “then your brother Jimmy has some explaining to do. I don’t think it’s the way to go. I believe a man ought to take care of his own problems. Do his own work.”

  “This isn’t my work.”

  “Sure it is,” Booger said. “You signed on a long time ago for this one. You’re riding for the brand till this range war is over.”

  I looked Gregore over. He was pathetic. I almost felt sorry for him. I said, “Anything else we should know?”

  “I can’t think of anything,” Gregore said.

  Booger raised the phone book. “Oh, come on, Gregore, give us a little more. Anything as long as it isn’t a lie.”

  Gregore gave a nod; his voice was hardly audible. “They’re gonna pick up the money from Dinkins and leave town, but before they do, they’re gonna fuck Dinkins up too.”

  “Kill him?” I asked.

  “No,” Gregore said. “When it’s over, they’re going to send a note with a DVD Caroline has been holding back. One of her and Dinkins doing the crawdad shuffle. That’ll ruin him.”

  “Who’s going to see it?” I asked.

  “Whoever they want. Cops maybe. Dinkins gets picked up, he can tell them all the conspiracy theories he wants, but he’ll have to implicate himself in the assassination plot. He’ll have to prove Caroline’s alive, and that she’s some kind of co-mastermind with some guy who looks like something out of a horror movie. It’s so complex and weird, it’ll be better he just takes a fucking for doing the fucking.”

  “Why screw Dinkins?”

  “You still don’t get it,” Gregore said. “The game, man. The game.”

  “Cops, they got to wonder where the DVD came from, don’t they?” I said.

  Gregore studied me. I could tell he was reluctant.

  I said, “Tell the truth, and I won’t have him hit you any more.”

  Booger raised the phone book. “Give me a reason not to believe you,” he said.

  “It’ll be mailed from your brother,” Gregore said, keeping an eye on Boo
ger. “The note to the cops will be typed. She got your brother’s signature off an old test paper, and she can copy it. She’s a damn good forger. That way, he doesn’t get off scot-free. Way Caroline sees it, your brother has got to get his too. She’s mad about those two geeks stealing the DVDs, and she’s mad you and Jimmy got them away from them. She likes throwing curveballs, but she don’t like catching them. God, man. If I could just have a little water.”

  “You know,” Booger said, “I’m a little thirsty myself. Working this phone book has dried me out. But, you know, I still got my swing.”

  42

  We put Gregore in the car and drove on out toward the scenic overlook. As we went along, me at the wheel, Gregore weak and bloody beside me, Booger leaned over the seat and pressed the .45 against Gregore’s head.

  “Man,” said Booger, “you’re not looking so good.”

  “I’m not feeling so good,” Gregore said. “You didn’t have to hit me so much.”

  “Hell,” said Booger, “I know that.”

  “I’m still thirsty,” Gregore said.

  “People in hell want ice water too,” Booger said.

  I thought about everything Gregore had said. I understood a lot of it now. Mostly I understood Stitch was playing Dinkins through Caroline, and he was playing the black and white communities like a finely tuned instrument.

  He had done the same sort of thing in other towns, playing his games, all of them ending in an assassination that didn’t seem connected to other events and oddities. It was all a happy game to Stitch.

  As for Caroline, once upon a time Stitch had been her mother’s lover, and then he had been hers. He had impregnated her, then gone away. Caroline had dumped their love child, and then, in time, Stitch came back. He was full of promises, rich with lies about love and how he wanted her and needed her back.

  Caroline wanted to believe, and so she had. He was probably the only person in the world she would believe. I bet he was the one who had given her the Fitzgerald book when she was a child. Maybe he had read the Poe stories to her, including her favorite, “The Premature Burial.”

  The whole goddamn thing creeped me, big-time.

  I remembered a line I had read from Jerzy Fitzgerald’s book. He said life was full of holes and the trick was to live between them. Stitch was not living between them. He was living in them, and loving it.

  We came to the top of the hill and I parked in front of a lightning-struck oak that had split down the middle almost to the ground. The tree was still alive and the split was wide and made a large V of darkness, and from that height the moon seemed wedged there in the fork. I turned off the lights and the motor. We got out of the car. Gregore could hardly stand up. He looked as if he had lost ten pounds and an inch in height.

  Booger gave him a kick in the ass, said, “Go up there and stand by that tree, limp dick.”

  Gregore trudged up the hill like Jesus carrying the cross up Calvary. When Gregore got up there, he stood in the fork of the lightning-struck tree. He put one hand on half of the tree to right himself. The moon was at his back like a spotlight. He was a silhouette up there.

  “You said you’d let me go,” Gregore said. His voice sounded hollow, floated down from the top of the hill like a dead leaf falling from a tree.

  “We’re going to leave you here,” I said. “I advise you not to come back to town. You stay out of this mess. Be done. You deserve worse than what we’re giving you.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” he said.

  “Not everybody,” Booger said. “Some are just unlucky. They get nominated for the big ticket. Right now, I’m punching yours.”

  By the time I realized what Booger meant, the .45 went up and the sound of it going off was like a mortar shot. Gregore’s head split and something jumped out of it and landed wetly in the grass and he went down, falling backward into the fork in the tree. He hung there for a moment and then his head went back and his body flipped after him. All that was left was his shoe hung up in the fork. I could hear him tumbling down the hill in the grass on the other side, and then I didn’t hear anything but the ringing in my ear from the blast of the .45.

  “Goddamn, Booger. Why, man?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Booger said. “You think he was just going to hitchhike to Lufkin, catch a bus to Vegas? He’d have been back in the game in no time. He might have warned that other guy, Numb Nuts…whatever his name is.”

  “Jesus, Booger.”

  “No one heard that shot. Not out here. And like all my guns, it’s a cold piece. You couldn’t trace this gun if you were Sherlock Holmes. Any of my weapons. There’s no record. Shit, I pretty much made some of them. Give me a pipe and a wrench and a cutting torch, I can make something that will shoot like a sniper rifle.”

  “It wasn’t necessary.”

  “Sure it was. Someone finds him, even they know who he is, who’s gonna miss him? Anybody that would deserves to be miserable. He was just as much a part of all of this as they were. You’re gonna do this thing, you can’t be fucking around and letting shits like him go and depend on them to be on the honor system. Once you wipe your ass on them, you flush them. And I got one other thing. He ain’t gonna get up. Let’s go on back to town and get that girl of yours before the mosquitoes eat me up. I done got a good bite on the back of my neck.”

  I drove us back. I sat silent. I had had my fill of death. That damn shoe hung up in the fork of that lightning-struck oak would be in my head forever.

  Booger turned on the radio, began tapping his fingers to a song. I wondered what he was thinking about. I wondered if he was thinking about anything.

  As I topped another hill and sailed around a curve, a fog settled on us and I had to go slow and lean forward to see. After a while the fog faded and the lights of Camp Rapture sprang up in front of us like Brigadoon rising from the mist. The tower on campus had a warm, gold light behind the face of the clock. All the little half-moon windows that ran up the front of the clock were lit up too, including the little half-moon above the face of the clock. The clock stood two stories above the building that housed the history department, and the windows there were dark. All around the tower there was darkness, and then there were lights way out from the tower, and they were the lights of the town. We came down from the heights of the hills and leveled out and cruised on into Camp Rapture. By then, the moon was a lost dream in the rearview mirror.

  I wanted to go to the campus right away, but Booger didn’t like that idea.

  “You’re so goddamn tired you’re trembling,” he said. “Me too. I wouldn’t mind something to eat, a bathroom break.”

  “We’re not on vacation,” I said.

  “No, but we’re serious, and we got time if what Gregore told us is true. We need a little rest. We can’t be off the beam.”

  “And what if Gregore is wrong?”

  “He could have been wrong yesterday, bro. Know what I’m saying?”

  I did. Belinda could already be dead. What Gregore told us could have been lies.

  We drove to my place, and when we got there I took a shower and put on fresh clothes and got Ernie’s backpack out of the hiding place in my closet. I took the DVDs out and put them back in the hole, and I took a couple of books from my shelf and put them in the pack; I might look a little old for a student, but they come in all ages, so I thought I could pull it off if someone stopped me.

  Booger was on the couch and he had taken his duffel bag from the car and had it open. In it was a long black barrel, a wooden knob for a stock, a trigger and a long telescopic sight and a silencer, a few other odds and ends. He put this stuff together quickly, screwed the bolts down with the edge of a coin, had a rifle with a silencer and a scope within instants.

  He said, “When this thing goes off, it’ll sound softer than a mouse farting with a cork up its ass. Unless you’re the one firing it, you won’t hear a thing.”

  “You just go around with a rifle in a duffel bag?” I said.

  “You know
me, I got all manner of shit in here, and nearly all of it says Bang. A few things, they cut. I get away from guns and knives, I start to feel like I’ve lost my friends, ’cause this stuff, you and Runt, are about it in the friend department.”

  “This friend good for what we need to do?”

  “He’s the goddamn ticket, bro. Made this dude,” he said, holding up the rifle. “Shoots one shot, .22 slug.”

  “One shot?” I said.

  “You’re me, you don’t need but one. We get in that tower, those little windows, there’s bound to be some way to get to them. They got to clean that shit somehow. I can position myself at one of them and aim across at the building where Stitch is gonna show to shoot. I give him one in the eye, he’s done.”

  “What if you don’t hit the eye?” I said.

  “Hell, you’re asking something you know the answer to. He’s still dead. But you know me, I can shoot the tip off a mosquito’s dick if you can point it out.”

  “What about the glass in the window?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  I took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen and stood at the window over the sink and watched the light of morning bleed into the darkness and melt it. I got a bottled coffee out of the fridge for me, a beer for Booger, his usual breakfast. When I got back to the living room area, he had already taken the gun apart and put it back in the duffel bag.

  “It’ll come together smooth,” he said. He took a folding knife from the bag, held it up. “Take this. I got one.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Take it anyway.” He tossed it to me and I slipped it into my front pocket.

  “And put this in your pack,” he said, bending over the bag like some kind of malignant Santa. He came up with a .38 automatic. He screwed a silencer on it. He tossed it to me. I caught it, made to toss it back at him.

  “I got a gun,” I said.

  “Not a clean one. Get through with this one, wipe it down and toss it. It’s a good shooter but it’s expendable. Leave your .38 here.”