Trouble Down South
“WHAT DO YOU mean trouble down south?”
Trudy Divine paused in a way that made me think I wasn't going to like what I was about to hear.
“Look alive, Howitzer,” she said, “I'm sending you down there to help out. Sort of an inter-departmental loan program the precinct is taking part in."
“What? Down to Brittlewood?”
“That’s right, Howitzer. They got a pederast running wild and the preacher’s wife has gone missing,” Trudy said. “All that in one week down there. I want you in Brittlewood helpin’ out our colleagues in their time of need.”
“Brittlewood’s a separate town. Hell, Trudy, it’s in a whole different county. I have no jurisdiction there.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said.
“What do you mean don’t worry about that?”
“You’re just there to assist. Not asking you make no arrests—nothing like that. Just support,” she said.
“Support how?” I said.
“Howitzer, we’re not about to argue this. You get yourself to Brittlewood this afternoon and that’s the end of it.”
“Trudy—is this about Kole?” I asked.
There was another pause. I could see her straightening her glasses in my mind, lifting them up by the nose ridge with her pinkie and setting them back down again.
“It’s not about Kole. It’s about supporting another law enforcement team that needs help,” she said.
“There’s 26 unsolved murders in Mason this year alone and the towns south of us got it even worse. Damnit, Trudy, the whole landscape is drenched in blood! What’s so important in Brittlewood if it’s not Kole?”
“It’s not about Kole,” she repeated, and then she said, “think of the story.”
“What damn story?” I nearly shouted into the plastic butt in the palm of my hand.
“Howitzer, these are dark times…” she began with bitter solemnity.
“Trudy, this ain’t one of your damn novels.”
“That what you think? What sort of detective novel begins with an interdepartmental loan? This is about government cooperation across county lines—teams partnering for the sake of the public good. You’re right, Howitzer: this isn’t a detective novel. It’s a feel-good story, and damned if the people of this county couldn’t use one.”
“Trudy, life isn’t a feel-good story,” I said
“Can’t you ever just follow a damn order? Sheriff Bodkin is your POC when you get to Brittlewood. He’s expecting you. I’ll be on the phone with him in two hours and you better be there when I call or you’ll be on DUI for a month. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal.”
I hung up.
Brittlewood was at least three hours south. I dropped the phone in the passenger seat and leaned back, staring out over the wheel. The heat rolled in waves, distorting the view of the street. The yellow dividing lines twisted like a contortion of reality and pressed on toward the blurred horizon. Southward roads lead into that uncanny heat, that dream-like haze past the perimeter of strip malls and palm-lined green golf courses that run alongside the highway; of billboards and shoe stores and vape sellers and dispensaries; of pawn shops and paycheck cashers and taquerias—it all just suddenly ends there at the shoehorn. Beyond that is an empire of rock beds and dry brush and oppressive heat.
I pressed the ignition and pulled out onto the open road. Town after town came and went, each looming in the distance and seemingly conglomerated around a single traffic light, and then receded in my rear view until it was nothing but a speck of dust. Men of all shapes and colors wander listlessly in these places: a man shirtless with one leg and a pair of old crutches leaning up against the bushes beside him sat on the edge of a welcoming sign—
WELCOME TO ADDLEDALE WHERE DREAMS COME ALIVE
—and smiled, waving to me as though he were running for mayor. There was a gas station on either side of the highway, a laundromat, a used car dealership, Pizza Hut and a Taco Bell all in the same plaza. There was an indiscriminate smattering of trailers and houses set back against the hills, some so faded they were just part of the landscape. I looked again to the man on the welcome sign. He smiled at me with his tarred, blackened mouth. The light changed and I moved on with the ineffable sense once more that a boundary was being crossed.
The brush hung ragged in the sun. ESCONDON: 45 MILES. That meant I was getting close. I knew I was approaching Brittlewood when the eastern hills grew into mountainous spires. It was 110 degrees on the roadways, but a white patchwork of snowfall showed itself however improbably from the mountain peaks. Finally, the first sign referencing my destination—BRITTLEWOOD: 16 MILES.
The crag of Mt. Cortada jutted upward from the red sands like the tooth of a primordial god, an unalterable sign of destruction and rebirth forced upward from the dark womb of the earth, and cast its shadow on the small town at its base. There it was: Brittlewood, ghost of a town that never was, coming into view at last.
‘Town’ isn’t the right word for places like Brittlewood—more like a scattered accumulation of residences and supporting businesses attending to passers through. As you pass the town line, a sign greets you and tells you the town population is 2261, though it’s hard to see how. The majority of the land mass of Brittlewood is barren of human residence. A few—including Kole—reside some ways off by themselves, but the majority of the town’s folk live on a small, tight cluster of roads—some paved, some dirt—just off the highway.
Towns like this conceal themselves behind their own façades, which in this case was the street running the length of the town from off the highway, called, appropriately, Front St. Here there is a post office, a small green, motel, school, a watering hole with iron bars running across the outside of its windows, and a run of shop fronts, some open, some boarded closed. Front St. terminates in a dirt road that curves around to a series of side streets before heading out aimlessly into the desert. The last building is the station, my destination. As I pull off the highway, I observe the Brittlewood behind Front St. to be more scrap heap than town. Car parts, pipes and washing machines stacked out in front of trailers so bleached by the sun they were nearly indistinguishable from the wonderland of metallic refuse that consumed their front yards. Scrapping is big business out here. A layer of rust seemed ever-present on everything I saw. How there is rust in a place with no rain I have never understood.
Set further back toward Mt. Cortada, at the edge of the valley—if I can call it that—is a row of respectable-looking houses in a section of town folks call "The Ledge." One in particular—an obscene purple Victorian more at ease in the suburbs of Boston than Hell’s Basin—I knew to be the home of Mayor Rupert Cowine. The other members of Brittlewood’s owner-class I can’t claim to have had congress with, but I did get the distinct feeling I would before my sojourn there was done.
I rolled slowly through the school zone drawing curious looks from curious onlookers. Was that a teacher or the caretaker? Children ran to and fro on a fenced-in slab of concrete.
As I came to the precinct, I noticed a small church across the street. I can’t say I recall this having been there before, but I may be mistaken. It was a small, white building with a steeple and a green lawn. Something caught my eye: a tangled mass of growth partially concealed by the church itself was visible. It was some kind of garden, but not a garden of flowers. It was more like a botanical garden of fronds and green leaves curling like ribbons, interlocking in all manner of tentacled contortions. It wasn’t the sort of thing one saw in a place like this. I glanced at the sign out front:
GARDEN OF EDEN SALVATIONIST CHURCH
REVEREND WOLFGANG MCCLELLAN
Wolfgang McClellan. I said the name in my head a few times. A name like that’s got unusual sticking power. That’s the missing woman, I realized—Sandra McClellan. The boys’ll have something to say about that, I thought.
I parked and walked into the station, expecting to see a flurry of activity, or at least the boys gathered ‘round a war room table, but I was privy to no such sight. In fact, the station was empty save a single man at the dispatch station. I was thrown at first because he wore a officer’s uniform, his head locked forward in silence as I entered. It was only as I came up to him that his face swiveled halfway to where I stood. He was clearly listening intently to something. The microphone remained between his folded hands, but he never spoke. Instead, he pulled his headphones off in a fit of defeated anticipation and looked at me.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I’m looking for Sheriff Bodkin,” I said.
“Well, you’re lookin’ at him,” he said.
I was taken aback.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “thought you was the dispatcher.”
“Today I am.”
“Regular dispatcher call out?” I asked, flashing him my badge.
“We ain’t got one. Budget cuts—you understand. Normally, Blevins oversees the line, but he’s out casing for Terry Grassman.”
“That’s the man you’re searching for—the pedophile,” I said.
“That’s right, a real weasel in sheep’s clothing—you understand,” said the sheriff.
“Saw the kids out there at the school. I know they’re fenced in, but I didn’t see anyone posted there. I’d think that’d be an obvious place to keep lookout.”
Sheriff Bodkin nodded his head.
“Nearest we can tell, he only has interest in one little girl—Samantha Dupree, but everyone ‘round here calls her Junie-bug. She’s at home with her mother. It's just them. Half my deputies are there keeping watch. The other half are out hunting him down. That’s why you’re here. Sure could use a hand,” he said.
“Not a big town. Can’t be too many places to hide,” I said.
“It’s a big desert out there.”
“You don’t think he’s out there, do you?” I said.
“No—no one could survive out there for long, at least not unseen. Naw, he’s probably holed up in a pile of scrap. Either that or someone's sheltering him. He had a lot of friends at the congregation.”
“Can’t be many people that’d want to shelter him knowing what he’s accused of,” I said.
“You’d be surprised,” Sheriff Bodkin said.
“In that case, ‘surprised’ might not be the word.”
He laughed and stood.
“C’mon back to my office. Let me show you his file,” he said, gesturing me to follow. “You’re the marksman, right? Got a name?”
“Howitzer,” I said.
“Got a first name?”
“Semblan. The name’s Semblan.”
“Howitzer’s good,” he said, sitting at his desk. “Want a donut?”
“No thank you,” I said.
Sheriff Bodkin opened a file and slid it across the desk.
“Luckily, the man we’re looking for is pretty conspicuous. Six-eight and nearly 260 pounds. What’s more, the man worked part time at the Ren faire in Tudlow.”
“Ren faire? Can’t say I know what that is,” I said.
“It’s a fair where you see people dressed up the way they were in medieval times—you understand. People love that sort of thing. Get a turkey leg and see people walking around in suits of armor, watch a joust—that sort of thing,” he said.
“Sheriff, are you telling me we have a six-eight pederast running around in a suit of armor?”
“No, luckily not. Terry Grassman was pulled from the jousting crew. He was too big to make the fights look realistic. He worked as a jester,” the sheriff said.
He slid a photograph across the table.
“This him?”
The sheriff nodded. He was indeed a large man. His face was panted white with black diamonds around his eyes and curlicues coming off his black lips onto his cheeks. His hat protruded in opposite directions; his shirt was checkered and he wore leggings with different colors on each leg tapering down to shoes that seemed fit for an elf. They curved back from the toes toward the instep where little bells hung suspended.
“He looks like a goddamn nightmare,” I said.
The sheriff looked up as the sound of tires pressing down on gravel came from outside.
“That’ll be Blithers. He’ll be partnering with you on this. The girl and her mother are safe, but manpower is reduced so long as we’re on lookout—you understand.”
I nodded just as the deputy walked in. He was a young, fresh-faced man with a smile a bit too wide, a manner a bit too enthusiastic.
“Blithers—this here’s Howitzer. He’s down from the big city to help you case for Terry Grassman.”
“S’well! Nice to meet you, Mr. Howitzer,” said the young deputy.
“Hey Blithers, want a donut?" asked the sheriff.
“Sure do!” Blithers said with an encompassing smile. He bit into the donut and just stood there for a moment in a sort of stupefied silence, smiling as he chewed as though he were ratifying his own sense of wonder. “C’mon Mr. Howitzer, let’s head out,” he said through his full mouth as he headed toward the front of the station, nodding the way with his head. It wasn’t until we got in the car that I saw powder and bits of chewed donut across his chest and down the front of his tie.
“So, where we headed first?” I asked him.
“I was gonna ask you that,” he said, sucking sweet powder from his fingertips.
“Well, I don’t know around here much, and I don’t know the perp, who he knew or where he liked to go enough to make any deductions as to his whereabouts, so why don’t we start with Mr. Grassman’s place of residence?”
“Oh, we already been there.”
“I’m sure you have, but I’d like to take a look myself. Maybe a set of fresh eyes will help,” I said. “And on the way over, how about you tell me what you boys found when you when you searched the place earlier?”
“Sure, but we didn’t find much,” said Blithers starting up the patrol car. We pulled out and headed down Front St. and again my eyes were drawn to that enigmatic and unkempt garden behind the church. We pulled off onto a side street across from a small bar called The Cabaret. Within moments, blacktop gave way to gravel, which in turn gave way to dirt.
“So, what did you boys find?” I said after a moment.
“Where? At Terry Grassman’s?” said the deputy.
“Yeah. Where else?”
“You can see for yourself,” he said. “We’re here.”
He pulled the handbrake and we got out of the car. Terry Grassman, it seems, occupied a trailer only scantly larger than himself. Its rusted frame looked like a skeleton fresh from a kill, waiting for the sun to bleach it and give it that distinguished look of age. The wall on the nearside gave way slightly from the frame directly above the rear axle, giving it the look of a sail having come loose from its boom. There had been an attempt to fasten it down with electrical tape, but evidently the heat of the sun had weakened the adhesive and the fiberglass siding sprang back out like a jack-in-the-box.
Blithers knocked on the front door. I unholstered my gun.
“Blithers,” I said in a loud whisper. “Blithers, what the hell are you doing?”
He turned to me with a look of quiet embarrassment, as though I caught him in the act of a foolish repetition. He put his palm to his forehead.
“You’re right, Mr. Howitzer. I don’t know what I was thinking. We already been here anyway. I guess we don’t need permission to enter seeing as though we have a warrant for the occupant’s arrest.” He then opened the door and stepped in.
“Deputy!” I shouted and raced in after him with my gun drawn, but when I crossed the threshold I saw only Blithers scratching his head, standing in the midst of a what must have been the detritus of Terry Grassman’s life—pizza boxes, food left out on tables, beer bottles and copious amounts of pornography. Some indiscernible organic matter was involved in an explosion in the microwave, the door to which hung open, covered in a dense film. The stench of the trailer in the heat—I was surprised it hadn’t drawn buzzards.
The deputy turned to me with a look of surprise.
“You can’t go runnin’ in to a situation like that! We need to coordinate our entry,” I said.
“Well we know he’s not here. We searched already.”
“We don’t know where he is. He could have returned after you and the boys cased it. What would you have done if he had been in here?” I asked.
“Well, hell, Howitzer—I guess I would have arrested him,” said Blithers.
“Just like that? You were gonna bring down a man of six eight and 260 pounds with your bare hands?”
The young deputy blinked at me and looked down. Rather than answer he began to pick crumbs off his tie.
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s take a look around.”
The deputy had been right—there wasn’t much to see. The man lived little better than an animal. The trailer consisted of a bed on one side, a bathroom I could hardly squeeze into and couldn’t imagine a man the size of Terry Grassman using, a kitchen consisting of a microwave and hot pot with a single frying pan covered in years of grease, and a dining area containing a plastic porch table and a patio chair.
The walls were a conglomeration of images, many of them obscene, but none so far as I could tell were of children like I had feared. Former porn stars and scantily clad women next to cars. A woman sitting spread eagle next to a fountain with a leather jacket hanging over her shoulders. But there were other images interspersed with the smut—a Kodiak bear beside a river with its nose just above the water, hunting for salmon I'd guess. The photograph looked like it was torn out of an issue of National Geographic. A white shark breaching in pursuit of a seal; wolves closing in on a caribou and its calf; a crocodile in the midst of a death-roll—it was a surprising array: sex and animals. A recipe for shortbread was tacked onto the front of the mini fridge. On the ceiling above his bed there was a photograph, also torn from a magazine, of a rock star—though I can’t say I knew him. The photograph was black and white. He held a microphone down by his side carelessly and wore a sleeveless shirt that read SEX IS MY RELIGION.
“Mr. Howitzer,” said Blithers lifting his shirt up over his nose. “I may have to wait outside.”
I can’t say I blamed him. The filth of the trailer baking in 100-degree heat produced a stench that was not for the feint of heart.
“Just Howitzer,” I said. “Go on then.”
I wasn’t sure there was anything to see. After having seen how he lived, Terry Grassman struck me as an entropic kaleidoscope of a man, an explosion of drives, urges and hungers that left traces on the walls of his trailer, however much they might be coming apart. Then I noticed it: a small gap between the microwave and the wall at the edge of the countertop. The whole of the countertop was covered in a dark, waxy film except for that gap. The laminate was clean, which means it had until recently been covered.
“Deputy,” I said just as Blithers was opening the door to leave.
He turned to me.
“The microwave has been moved,” I said.
On a hunch I fished my arm between the microwave and the wall panel. My fingers found only a single card—a business card by the feel of it.
“What’s that you got?” asked Blithers.
“You know a Fred Hotep?” I turned to him.
“Sure—everybody does. He works over with the church doing mission work. Why?”
I flipped around the business card in my hand—
FRED HOTEP – PLANT
AND ANIMAL IMPORTS.
On the flip side of the card it showed the face of what was to my slight understanding a rendering of the Virgin Mary, albeit with a peculiar smile. The deputy scratched his head.
“He know Terry Grassman?” I asked.
“Sure. They’re part of that mission group. They go down to Central America,” he said.
“That run by the church?”
“Yes sir, run by Sandra McClellan. Or at least it was.”
I held the card a moment, turning it over between my fingers.
“Fred Hotep—any reason Terry Grassman might want to keep dealings with him out of sight?”
The deputy looked me.
“How do you s’pose this got back there?” I said holding the card up and gesturing toward the microwave with my shoulder.
“Well, I reckon it fell.”
“Fell from where? The microwave is under the cabinets—nowhere for it to have fell from. It was stashed there in a hurry, which probably means you boys were hot on his trail and he didn’t know what else to do with it. Any reason he’d want to conceal his relationship with Fred Hotep?”
My question fell on deaf ears. The deputy scratched his head aimlessly and wandered back to the car. I found him looking out toward the horizon as though there were answers to be found there. Evidently, he didn’t feel there was much else to be gleaned from the stinking mess within those collapsing trailer walls.
“C’mon, son,” I said and opened the passenger side door to the cruiser. “You a member of the church?” I asked.
He turned suddenly in a way that told me he was and this all was making him uncomfortable.
“We should do the rounds, keep a look out for Terry,” said Blithers.
“I’d like to meet the family first,” I said.
“We’re losing daylight,” he said. “It’s gonna be hard to see him after dark.”
“He’s holed up somewhere. We’re not going to get him just wandering around. We need intel—some sense of who he’s involved with and what he’s doing. That’s gonna point us to where he’s at.”
The deputy nodded solemnly and started the car. We drove out past the rows of trailers and their various collections of mechanical parts scattered all around, and out toward the mountain base. Just past the final row of trailers, the ground lifted and flattened again like a mesa protruding out from that anomalous zone where a face of sheer rock springs forth from the purity of the earth, and on top of which sat a line of prefabricated mansions like a row of miniature doll houses placed upon a shelf. I guffawed as we approached.
“Duprees live out here?” I asked the deputy, though I knew it to be a foolish question.
“Like desert royalty,” he said. “Two houses down from Mayor Cowine himself.”
“Well hot damn,” I said.
The deputy pulled off to the side of the road in front of the first house and brought the car to rest beside another patrol car. The house was a McMansion with a façade of cool white stone, which made it stick out against the red sand. Even on this rare street of wealth, this residence wasn’t quite at home.
Two deputies were stationed outside the front door. They posted themselves like sentries, one on either side of the door, and stood emotionless and still like they were guards for the Tower of London, except both men were staring intently downward at the small screens they held in their hands. Blithers approached, hailing them, but the men were so intent on what they were looking at that the greeting of their colleague yielded no recognition. I suspected a woolly mammoth could have gone trotting by in the last hour and they’d have been none the wiser. It was not until he spoke that they broke file, suddenly and unexpectedly at ease, and put their phones in their pockets.
“Hey Howitzer, this is Blevins and Bustamante,” he said and waved me over.
I closed the door to the car and adjusted my hat. Even with the approach of evening breaking the day’s spell along the horizon, the sun overhead pressed down like a weight upon all who strode beneath it.
“Howdy boys,” I said coming up the slate walkway and tipped my hat.
“You the big city detective?” asked the one on the left—Blevins, I think.
“Yes sir, but I wouldn’t call it the big city—just a larger town.”
“What we got going on, fellas?” said Blithers.
The deputy on the left—Bustamante, I think—just scratched his head.
“Ain’t seen hide nor hair of him,” he said. “Wherever Terry Grassman is, he’s holed up real good.”
“You boys mind if I take a perimeter check?” I asked.
“Suit yourself,” one of them said.
I nodded and stepped off the walkway to make my way around the house. Blithers came with me.
“What we looking for?” he asked.
I looked down. Dirt clumps broke beneath my feet. The whole area had been hoe-broken recently. Grass seed was scattered here and there.
“Watch your step,” I said. “Sprinkler heads.”
Blithers looked down and began walking from toe to toe as though he were avoiding landmines.
“Duprees just move in?” I asked.
The lawn wasn’t the only work in progress. The cement foundation was fresh. Hardly a cobweb was strewn beneath the siding. A wheel barrow stood along side the house at the front edge where the unfinished façade gave way to bare plywood. Blithers looked at me.
“This place isn’t finished,” I said and looked up at the grand face that towered above me. The sun cut along the dark outline of the roof exposing a blank sheet of growing twilight to the dark surfaces of the windows overhead. The windows were tall and triangular, like the windows you’d expect in a grand cathedral. Through the glow I could see the spiral of a staircase terminating in a second floor adjacent to the tops of the windows. The way I read it, those stairs were more to be ascended than climbed. It struck me this Dupree woman could survey the whole of the visible landscape encompassing Brittlewood. Something about this house and its audacity, the sheer ambition of it, suggested to me that this woman was a frequent surveyor of her domain.
“Ms. Dupree just moved in, I think,” the deputy said.
“From where?” I asked, turning to him.
“From here. They had a trailer down off Potrero, a little ways from Front St.”
“Any connection to Terry Grassman?” I asked.
“Not that we know of.”
I nodded and walked along the side of the house toward the back. If Terry Grassman wanted to make another play for the little girl, it wouldn’t be easy. Besides the doors, which looked to be carved out of giant wood blocks, there weren’t any points of ingress save a small window cut into the foundation, though that hardly seemed big enough to accommodate a child. The windows were all well above a man’s height. Even for a man of Terry Grassman’s size, it wouldn’t have been easy to break into a house like that.
At the back of the house, there was an explosion of green: a perfect square of fresh-cut grass in line with the house’s outline as if it had been unrolled like the red carpet. A garden had been etched at the far edge above which orange and red danced in the sudden breeze with the cold, dark face of stone looming just far enough in the background to be out of focus. A wooden porch had been erected at the rear of the house. A glass sliding door was shut and the curtains drawn. I walked up the porch steps and had a look at the door. This would be the easiest way in for a man in frantic desperation for his continually denied sin, but there was no indication anyone had been there.
Blithers was standing on the dirt clumps beside the house when I detected the subterranean vibrational hiss of water pressure.
“Deputy!” I shouted to Blithers—“Come over here to the porch.”
He looked up and stared blankly.
“Damnit Blithers, the sprink…”
Just then the sprinklers turned on and the air was filled with twisting aerial cascades of water. Blithers hopped back and forth, screeching and changing direction in a panic like a cartoon character caught unawares in the middle of a shootout. After a series of indecisive changes in his direction, he broke into a sprint reaching the porch soaked from head to toe. Over my shoulder I felt a sense of movement. Through the glass door I saw the curtains drawn aside and there she stood—Ms. Dupree, I take it—wearing a flower print dress that came to her mid-thigh, framed by the doorway like a photograph come to life. She slid the glass door open and stepped out, eyeing me as she came across the threshold. She crossed her arms and stood, giving me the distinct feeling all of a sudden that I was interrupting something.
“You the big city detective?” she asked, though her tone inflected her words as if it were a statement of fact.
“I see word gets ‘round,” I said.
“It certainly does, at least ‘round these parts.”
“Howitzer,” I said, extending my hand.
She stared at it for a moment before extending her own in return, arching her wrist delicately like a southern belle.
“What are you boys looking around here for? I don’t know where Mr. Grassman’s got to, but I’m quite sure you won’t find him here.”
“We have to start by covering all bases, Ms. Dupree,” I said.
“Call me Cream,” she said, looking me square in the eye.
“I read Terry Grassman’s file, but if you don’t mind, I’d like you to take me through what happened.”
“I been through this half a dozen times already.”
“I understand that, ma’am. Just the same, I’d like you take me through it one more time. Any details you can provide would be appreciated.”
She relented and shrugged, resigned to telling what had almost happened to her daughter once more.
“We were at the center of town. Junie-bug had just gotten out of school. She was playing with the other kids at the playground. I was walking down Front St., coming from The Cabaret.”
“You work there?”
“I own it. Anyway, I was walking to pick her up and take her home. The teachers watch the playground for a bit after school gets out and I usually give her a little time to play with the other children before I pick her up and bring her home. But yesterday I heard shouting as I approached. I started running and there, as I saw it, my Junie-bug consumed in the embrace of that man! Terry Grassman all dressed up in his joker’s garb, lookin’ a damn fool. She was so scared. He just hugged her there, holding her off the ground. Two teachers were trying to pry her away from him, but they were trying not to hurt her, and just sort of sat there tugging at his arms. As I got closer I could hear him. He kept saying it—disgusting!—‘I love you, Junie-bug,’ over and over. To my daughter.”
She made to spit at the ground.
“There he was, son of a bitch! ‘I love you, Junie-bug.’ How dare he say such a thing…”
She trailed off. I recorded what she said in my notepad, but put it away once she stopped. It didn’t seem to me I was going to glean anything the file hadn’t already told me. Nonetheless, I asked her what happened next.
“I jumped on his back, scratching at his neck, trying to bite his shoulder—anything to make that monster let go, but it was like he was somewhere else. Like he couldn’t notice anything except my daughter. If it weren’t for deputy Belkins, he might well have carried her off with him.”
“He try and apprehend him?” I asked.
A look of surprise came over her face.
“That what your file say?”
“Yup,” I said. “File says Grassman dropped your daughter and ran when he saw the deputy coming,” though the file said nothing of the kind. I knew Deputy Belkins had pepper sprayed Terry Grassman to get him to let go of the girl, but this succeeded in nothing but stimulating the sinuses of the large man, who in turn sneezed violently into the deputy’s face, effectively pepper spraying him as well. However, as Belkins fell ineffectual to the ground, Terry Grassman’s sneeze loosened grip and the Dupree girl fell right through his arms to the ground beside the squirming deputy where her mother scooped her up into her arms and began running across the playground. After a moment, the large man gave chase, but just as he was closing in, Blithers and Busterino came running out of the station and up the street toward the school. Whatever spell Terry Grassman was under, it broke on the encroaching wave of lawmen and he turned and fled.
“Belkins pepper sprayed his damn self, but I got my daughter as the other deputies arrived and Grassman ran off. That’s about all I got to say on it.”
“You think he was on something?” I asked genuinely.
“Hell should I know? Probably. I never seen someone get pepper sprayed and just sneeze, but don’t much care to be honest. Not bringing my baby girl out of this damn house until that maniac is caught or dead. Now are you fine boys gonna do your job or not?”
I closed my pen and put it back in my pocket alongside my notepad.
“Momma!” I heard from the kitchen behind her. “I wanna go playset!”
“Well, I s‘pose that’s enough to go on. Thank you for your time,” I said.
She nodded and stepped back inside, closing and locking the glass door behind her. She turned and once more looked me square in the eye. Her expression was curious. I could not tell whether it was an evocation of lust or contempt, concern or pity, but she held my gaze for a moment before drawing the curtains and disappearing behind them.
Blithers was at the foot of the stairs shaking himself dry like a dog.
“C’mon,” I turned to him.
“Where we going?”
“To find Terry Grassman,” I said.
We walked back along the flat of dirt suds, now a sopping wet mud field. I kept thinking of Terry Grassman’s face, that horrific expression, half the white jester paint, half the human animal concealed beneath it. It was a witless, fatuous face, but it was somehow also a sneering face—the face of a dumb animal that through the sheer malice of its intent was able to transition effortlessly into the higher realms of human evil.
“Mommy…” I heard and turned.
Blithers and I were beside the small window in the cement foundation. I knelt beside it and looked in. The lights switched on and I saw Cream Dupree and her daughter walking across the center of the basement. Like the outside of the house, it was still under construction. There were piles of lumber against the far wall. Half-framed walls stood with industrial plastic hanging, moving in the air currents wafting down from the HVAC overhead. I rested my hand on the cement and watched the loving bond between mother and daughter.
The far corner of the basement appeared to be the only finished part. Carpet was down and there was a child’s playset of a kitchen surrounded by an assortment of toys, much the way the trailers further down in the valley maintained their own collection of car parts.
Desert royalty, I thought.
My finger touched the edge of the glass and I felt it give. I narrowed my eyes and pressed, and the window began to swing open from the bottom. I extended my arm and pushed the window open all the way before closing it silently. The window squeaked, but Cream Dupree and Junie-bug didn’t notice. The sound must have been swallowed up by the hum of the HVAC.
“Window’s open…” I said half-aloud, but the deputy must’ve heard me.
“Yeah, but no one could fit through there. It can’t be more than 14 inches wide and maybe 10 high.”
The deputy had a point. There was no way anyone larger than a child could fit through that window. I drew back my hand to stand and felt a moist sensation on my knuckles.
I looked down—“Paint,” I said.
White paint with a tinge of black—a streak of it ran down the length of my hand. I looked down at the cement ledge beneath the window. Once I shaded my eyes, I could see it. White and black makeup was caked on the cement leading into the window.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“What’s that, Howitzer?” said Blithers.
“Hey!” I shouted into the window. “Get out of there! Now!”
Cream Dupree heard and turned.
“What?” she said, but I was up on my feet heading toward the front of the house by the time she spoke.
“Howitzer!” I heard behind me.
“Deputy, let’s move!” I said.
“What’s going on?”
I turned and shouted to him, “Terry Grassman’s inside!”
I unholstered my gun and ran to the front door. I started pounding on it with the butt of my gun and shouting. Blevins scratched his head and stood back.
“Boys, our man’s inside,” I said.
“Huh?” Blevins got out before I shouted again.
“Ms. Dupree! Open up!”
The door swung open and Cream Dupree stood there with the fury of a woman who has put up with hell and been given nothing in recompense.
“Mr. Howitzer, you’d better have a damn good expl…”
I pushed past her inside the house.
“Where’s the entrance to the basement?”
“Hold on, now you’re going tell me exactly what the hell is…”
“The entrance to the basement!” I yelled.
Her look of irritation faded to concern and she led me to a staircase leading downstairs from the kitchen. I ran downstairs and when I got down to the basement level, all was quiet. She was there, the little girl—Junie-bug—just staring at me, her hair a mass of tight blonde curls that hung up over her tan face. I put my finger up vertically in front of my lips, but she only stared at me. I realized I had my gun in my hand, so I holstered it and backed away. It occurred to me that given the previous day’s events, the child may not take kindly to strange men intruding on her space.
The deputy was beside me. I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs over the hum of the HVAC. Cream Dupree swept past me like a gale and sat on one knee beside her child.
“Gonna be alright, baby,” she said, stroking the girl’s head like she was a scared lamb in search of comfort, but the child only stared ahead in silence. She turned to me—“You’re going to tell me what this is about!”
She spoke in a pitch that was low but deliberate and tense. Once more I raised my finger to my lip.
“Ssshhh,” I said.
She put her arms around the child, hugging her head to her chest, rocking her back and forth as if to console the hysteria that never arrived—perhaps soothing something deep within herself. Cream Dupree once more met my eyes. Her expression was transfigured into what seemed to me to be a rare passivity in her—an expression that said she was willing to go without an explanation just this once if it could help keep her daughter safe.
The deputy said something, but I couldn’t hear over the HVAC.
“What’s that?” I turned to him.
“Hey Howitzer, how could Terry Grassman get in here, anyway?” Blithers said, wet and confused.
Just at that moment, the house above in all its elegance and monstrosity appeared to reach its ideal temperature, for the HVAC abruptly switched off and the vents went silent overhead.
“I don’t know where he’s at,” I told the deputy. “I just know he’s in this house. Now take out your taser. We’re going to escort Ms. Dupree and her daughter out of here so we can do a proper search.”
I noticed then that she was staring at me, the little girl—Junie-bug—and smiling. My finger was still pressed to the front of my lips, and she placed her finger in front of her lips, as though she were telling me to be quiet. At just that moment, I heard it. It was feint and muffled, but discernible. Bells. It was the sound of bells.
“Howitzer, I don’t know…”
I held the palm of my hand to his face to silence him, taking the finger off my lips and pointing up. All was quiet for a moment. Blithers looked up, and there it was again: quiet and dully metallic, like a hand wrapped around the bell’s perimeter to keep it from making a sound, we heard it. The deputy covered his mouth in astonishment.
“That’s right,” I said. “He’s up there in the ducts.”
I looked over at Cream Dupree and with nothing more than an exchange of glances, it was established between us that she would pick up her daughter and carry her out of the basement. However, no sooner than that unsaid accord had been reached, the sound of heavy squirming was heard overhead. It was the sound of a frustrated struggle, the movement of limbs within a confined space. The vent at the edge of a section of HVAC came off and landed some 25 feet away as if it had been kicked off in a violent outburst.
“Junie-bug?” emitted a voice overhead. “Junie-bug, I love you.”
It was a tin drawl contorted through the medium of the HVAC system, but it had the otherworldly effect of a voice transmitted from across some uncanny dimensional divide. I looked over at the child. The voice belonged to Terry Grassman, a troubled and troubling man, a sick man in need of both health and punishment, but her quaking eyes fixed upward on what to her must have been The Devil. The child was terrified.
Cream Dupree gathered the girl in her arms and made to stand and flee, when out of the shaft where until a moment before there had been a vent, out slithered two feet in green elf shoes and little bells on their curled toes followed by two harlequined legs. He didn’t seem to be moving his body consciously, but instead appeared to slither forward like toothpaste being squeezed out of the tube.
Cream Dupree had a look of belligerent terror scrawled on her face. Blithers too did not know what to make of what his eyes were encountering. I hardly did myself. All I could think of were the old cartons where the cat chases the mouse but gets dragged tail first absurdly and impossibly through the mouse hole.
Terry Grassman wiggled himself free inch by rapid inch, nearly setting his feet on the ground as he wiggled to get the last bulk of his shoulders free from the HVAC. Seconds later, he set his feet on the ground with the grace of a ballerina.
“Junie-bug!” he said with an alacritous smile.
He had touched down on the floor between Cream Dupree and the stairs, trapping her and her daughter in the finished section of basement.
“Deputy!” I shouted.
“Right!” He fumbled the taser from his belt, adjusted his grip and took aim, but just as he went to pump 50,000 volts of God’s wrath into Terry Grassman, water from his soaked clothes and hair struck the contact point, resulting in a miniature electrical explosion that carried the hapless deputy some five feet backwards and well into unconsciousness.
“Junie-bug! I love you! I love you! I lo…”
He made a lunge for the woman and her daughter.
“Shit!” I said, unholstering my gun, and fired a round off into his upper thigh. His body collapsed with a thud, but his legs moved forward like a marching toy soldier that had toppled over. His voice droned on in that mechanical proclamation of unnatural love as if he were still on his feet making his way to the object of his desire.
“I love you, Junie-bug. I love you…”
I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing, but Terry Grassman then stood, bleeding and quivering, and once more stepped forward. Cream Dupree slid her daughter behind her and faced the monster. As he stood, I took aim and upon his first step I blew out the socket of his left knee. A vaporous red cloud hung in the air. Specks of red flecked onto the white of Cream Dupree’s summer dress and ran in tiny rivulets along the lines of her handsome face. At this, Terry Grassman screamed, clutched his leg and collapsed.
“Get her out!” I yelled. Cream Dupree and her girl looked at me as though I had spoken from beyond the time barrier and in another language. “Now!” I yelled again.
This time the message took hold. She hoisted her daughter over her shoulder and carried her up the stairs like a sprinter carrying a sack of potatoes.
“Junie-bug, wait…” Terry Grassman lifted his hand forlornly to the retreating child and her mother. “But I love you…”
All recollection of pain in this man appeared to be gone. He tried to stand, but his injured limbs would not support his weight and he collapsed again into a heap of despair. Sensing movement behind me, I turned to see Blithers sitting up and rubbing his head. He looked around in confusion as if he had just woken up fresh in his own bed and couldn't square that with where his eyes were telling him he was.
I walked over and helped him to his feet.
“Did we get him?” the deputy asked.
“You bet we did, cowboy,” I said.
Blithers shook his head and moved his fingers.
“My hands are numb,” he said. “Gosh Howitzer, did you shoot him?”
“Just enough for him to live and see justice. Few shots to leg, that’s all,” I said.
“You shot him in the leg?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Then how’s he standing?”
I turned and my eyes must've widened to the size of dinner plates. Terry Grassman, despite a gunshot wound to each of his legs, was standing upright. What is more, he took a step and then another, dragging himself unsteadily forward like he was the walking dead.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I muttered. He was almost to the stairs.
“Junie-bug, I love you,” he called up toward the basement door. “I love you. I lov…”
I struck him in the back of the head with the butt of my pistol and he fell like a ton of anything that falls and doesn’t get up again. Blithers came up beside me and we cuffed the oversized jester together before I sent him outside to gather the deputies standing guard and call in the rest of the force. Halfway up the stairs the deputy turned back and looked at me.
“Hey Howitzer,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Back there—there must have been some water on the ground. I think I might’ve slipped. That coulda happened to anyone.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “I think that’s what happened.”
He gave a gleeful smile—I don’t know what else to call it—turned, and bounded up the stairs like an excited child leaving me to brood over the impossible quivering mass that was Terry Grassman.
