Bessie Needs To Be Fed

Bronco Bratkowski is at it again.

The six-foot, seven-inch biker looms over a bulky man wearing a greasy cowboy hat.

“I say John Wayne!”

“Eastwood,” the man in the cowboy hat says calmly, sipping his beer.

“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Duff. The Duke’s the greatest cowboy ever!”

“Oh yeah? How many Oscars did Wayne win? One! Eastwood’s got six!”

Bronco grabs Duff up by his collar.

“That’s how many times I’m gonna slug you, buckaroo!”

Bronco catches a glimpse of a man sitting at the end of the bar staring at him. The man’s face is a mass of scorched, scarred skin.

“What you lookin’ at, Frankenstein?”

The man turns away, nipping at his drink.

Bronco turns his attention to Trevor Gleason, the Flamingo Lounge’s bartender. Fiftyish and rail-thin, Trevor has no intention of getting between the two mountainous, much younger patrons.

“You need to get a better brand of customer in here, Trevor. First, you let this goat herder in, and now you got Freddie Kruger sittin’ at the end of the bar.”

Duff huffs. “If he wants to upgrade the place, he should start by kicking out dirtbags like you.”

“Oh, I’m gonna do some kickin’ all right, buckaroo, startin’ with your backside! Let’s go outside!”

***

Bronco slams Duff in the back of the head with a blackjack before he can turn around. Duff falls face-first onto the pavement.

Bronco rolls him over. Sitting on his chest, Bronco pummels Duff until his meaty hands are raw and bloody.

Snickering, he kicks Duff in his side for good measure.

Bronco heads for the door. He gags back his beer at the sight of the man with the burned face.

“You got somethin’ to say, Frankenstein?”

“Blowing out somebody else’s candle doesn’t make yours shine any brighter,” the man says. “You’re still a bully and a coward.”

“I can cut you down just as easy as I took care of that Clint Eastwood groupie,” Bronco says.

The man reaches into the side pocket of his leather jacket, pulling out a straight razor.

“Come on, then. Bessie needs to be fed.”

***

F.B.I. Agent Kenyon Voss stands over Bronco’s body.

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“Straight razor. Same as the others,” his partner, Laniyah Blue Sky, observes.

Kenyon’s furrowed brow, slightly hunched back, and paunch substantiate his twenty-three years chasing serial killers. Dark-haired with prominent cheekbones, Laniyah has relied upon the mystical aspects of her Sioux culture to help her cope with fourteen years of solving aberrant crimes.

They watch Duff being loaded into an ambulance.

“What did Bronco’s dancing partner have to say?” Kenyon asks.

“He said Bronco ambushed him. When he woke up, he found Bronco filleted next to him. I don’t think he did it. He was the one who called the cops. Why slice somebody up and then call the police?”

“Keep checking for evidence. I’ll talk to the bartender.”

Trevor shakes his head in disbelief.

“I told Bronco a hundred times, ‘One of these days you’ll run into some hombre tougher than you.’”

“So, he was a troublemaker?”

“Give him alcohol, and he becomes Attila the Hun. Tonight, he had a problem with some dude wearin’ a cowboy hat. So, they went outside. He had a problem with another guy earlier.”

“Do you know who it was?

“Nope. Never seen him before. But I’ll never forget him.”

“Why’s that?”

“His face looked like a Jackson Pollock paintin’, like a melted candle, all scarred up. He was average height, about five feet nine. Acted like he wanted to be alone. With a mug like that, everyone obliged.”

He’s killed so many men that he can’t remember them all. There was the guy in the grocery store in Vista, Connecticut, who laughed at him and called him a disgusting monster. He had the last laugh, leaving the man bleeding out behind the wheel of his Mercedes while he was playing Candy Crush. Then there was the Uber driver who kicked him out of his car, telling him to join a circus.

“I wonder if they ever found him in his trunk?” he says aloud.

Bessie needed to be fed, but there were lines he wouldn’t cross… No children or women, particularly old ones…

***

He left the man’s body in the alley, his rheumy eyes looking up at the stars. He’d never call anyone else a freak. Bessie had done her job well, slicing him from ear to ear.

Rounding the corner, he sees two young gangbangers wrestling with an old woman for her purse. She fends off one with her cane, but the other mugger wearing a Yankee cap puts her in a stranglehold.

Crossing the street, he appears as a shadow under the streetlamp, slashing the thug in the Yankee cap across his back. He yowls in pain, releasing the old woman.

At the sight of him, the first thug mutters, “Dios Mio!” and races away.

The mugger in the Yankee cap turns, shaking.

“What? What the hell are you?”

He shows him by cutting an X across his face. Before the thug can finish screaming, he grabs him by his hair, and Bessie gives him a wide smile.

The dead mugger drops to the ground like a deflated balloon. The old woman looks at him, her eyes rimmed with pity.

Breaking the tension, he asks, “May I walk you home, Ma’am?”

She takes his hand. “You messed up your shirt… I still have a few of my late husband's clothes in the closet that might fit you.”

***

The piercing scream of the police sirens draws nearer. He smiles to himself, knowing he’ll remain free. He and the old woman are already three blocks away.

***

“Same as the others,” Kenyon says. “Two slashes in an X pattern across the face. Then he grabbed him by the hair and slit his throat.”

“Guy thinks he’s Zorro. So bald men are safe from the ‘Straight Razor Slasher,’” Laniyah replies.

“Don’t sensationalize him. He’s getting bold. He usually kills in anonymity, but tonight he killed out in the open.”

“Which means someone may have seen him.”

***

The police find a shivering Raul Mendoza in an alley half a mile away, rocking back and forth and muttering, “…Dios Mio… El Diablo vive…No tiene cara…”

“What’s he babbling about?” Laniyah asks.

“He’s saying, ‘My God, the devil lives… And he has no face.”

***

There were times he was a good man.

Until it cost him everything…

The man who’d cut him off in traffic would now have to spend eternity without the middle finger he used to flip him off.

It’s also fitting he’s going to be found next to the garbage cans at his house.

He tosses the finger to a stray cat, who looks at the bloody digit, mews suspiciously, and backs away.

The smell of smoke invades his lungs.

Crossing the street, he runs to the corner.

A two-story apartment building is on fire.

A woman on the second floor opens up her window, shrieking for help.

He runs inside. Climbing the steps, he bangs on the tenant’s doors, gathering them in the hallway.

“Hold hands… Don’t let go, no matter what happens!”

Coughing, their eyes stinging and watering, the tenants follow him down the steps to safety.

Ignoring the flames melting his leather jacket, he rushes back inside, knocking on the doors of the first-floor apartments. Most of the tenants have left, but a woman in a wheelchair and her nurse peek out of her apartment.

“Help! I don’t want to die!”

He grits his teeth as he peels off his jacket, taking layers of skin on his arms with it. He takes off his T-shirt, covering the head of the woman in the wheelchair. Pushing the wheelchair through the door to safety, he turns, making another charge into the building.

The building collapses, and he’s buried beneath an avalanche of red-hot bricks.

He’s given the last rites when the rescue team digs him out. Before he passes out, he hears a firefighter moan, “Where’s his face?”

***

Walking to the mirror, he stares at the hideous reflection of himself, saying, “It isn’t just the fire that made you ugly…”

***

He hears his parents arguing again. His mother screams, “I’m not going to take this anymore, your drinking, your cheating, your abuse!”

“Like you’re Mother Theresa!” his father yells.

He hears a slap. Maybe it was his mother acting out. She’s as fiery as her red hair. Perhaps it was his drunken Dad’s anger exploding.

His mother was a cashier who should have been destined for greater things. She babied him, giving him candy and video games. His trucker father treated him like an inconvenience.

His mother shouts, “That’s it! I’m done!”

The sound of glass hitting the floor sets his teeth on edge. A series of loud thumps, grunts, and muffled screams follows.

His father bursts into the room. He can smell the whiskey on his breath.

His father is holding a belt.

“You’re gonna be quiet about this, or so help me…”

His father doesn’t need to finish his sentence.

Maybe his father murdered his mother, or she left on her own, but he’d never see her again.

When his father sobered up the next day, he gave him a straight razor, saying, “Only losers use their fists. This baby’ll end any doubt about who’s in charge.”

He names the razor after his mother.

***

His first victim was his father.

Not long after his mother had left home, his father went on the road, ending up in Georgia. He met Tater Todd, an alcoholic country music singer, and for the next fifteen years, his father served as his equipment manager and drinking buddy.

He was a man the next time he saw his father. It was after the fire that left him with the face of a nightmare. A nurse at his father’s assisted living facility tracked him down through one of the articles that had been written about his saving a dozen people in a fire.

The woman at the front desk choked back her disgust at the sight of him but managed to tell him his father hadn’t had a visitor in the four years he’d been living there.

His father didn’t recognize him. Liquor and drugs had erased his past.

Bessie had been asleep for a long time, since he was a child. She still took pity on his father.

He couldn’t cut him, so he cut his father’s oxygen line instead.

***

Kenyon organizes a press conference, pleading to the public for information about the serial killer.

“The Straight Razor Slasher is a dangerous psychopath. All of his victims have been men… So far… He doesn’t want to take your money, he doesn’t want to take your car, he wants to take your life…”

A question from the gallery of reporters rings out.

“WHY?”

“Our profiler believes he was traumatized as a child by another man, probably an authority figure. Now he wants all men to suffer as much as he did.”

After the interview, Kenyon asks Laniyah, “You think this’ll snuff him out?”

“The Sioux have a proverb, ‘Never wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.’”

***

He sees the press conference on TV and figures a spell in the Adirondacks in upstate New York might help cover his trail.

A day later, he pulls into the driveway of a chalet-style home in Whispering Waters. The trees and foliage near the house are overgrown, and there are no cars in the ruddy driveway, giving the appearance that the place is abandoned.

He’s a few hours into a deep sleep when he’s shaken awake.

He looks up at a bald, pudgy man wearing coveralls and thick glasses.

He’s holding a rifle in the crook of his arm.

“Sorry, I thought the place was abandoned!” he says.

“I’m not much of a housekeeper. I don’t see too well anymore.”

“I’m on my way north,” he says. “I’ll get out of your way.”

The man limps into the kitchen, dropping a turkey on a table.

“No rush. I could use some company. Name’s Butler Holmgren. This is the first time I shot a turkey. You’re welcome to stay for dinner. There’ll be plenty.”

The pair chats as they eat.

“You sound like an educated man,” Butler says.

“I had a good job once. I was a history teacher.”

Butler’s owlish eyes blink behind his glasses. “What happened?”

“I had an accident. Then the school let me go. They said I’d scare the kids.”

“That’s illegal,” Butler notes.

“They paid me well to go away.”

“And you’ve been going away ever since.”

“Something like that,” he replies. “Pardon me for saying this, but you don’t seem like the off-the-grid type.”

“I’m not. My brother and I own this place. He used to come here a lot. I was a lawyer. I practiced and lived in Queens. My brother died last year. Cancer. I needed a change, and I was retired, so I came up here. Now I’ve got the big C. It’s a slow, ugly way to die. I don’t know if I can make the journey.”

Bessie begins to scream.

“Maybe I can help you.”

***

It’s time for a new vehicle.

The check engine light has been on for the past fifty miles. He knows he may only have a few more miles before the car breaks down.

He drives into South Lima, population 249.

He sees several cars and a serviceable Jeep parked outside the general store.

A disheveled man wearing a grubby denim jacket comes out of the store, yanking a blonde-haired little boy behind him. The child breaks free. What he sees next reminds him of the pain of his father’s leather belt.

“…If you can’t fight for yourself, kid, I will…”

He follows the Jeep to a dingy, broken-down house with a washing machine on the porch and a trio of useless cars rusting away in a nearby field.

The shaggy-looking dad comes to the door, a Chesterfield cigarette hanging from his lower lip and a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand.

“I know I’m ripped, but great googly moogly, what happened to you?”

“I can’t help the way I look,” he replies.

“You from Child Services?”

“That’s right. And I’m here to revoke your right to be a parent because you suck at it.”

He slashes the man’s throat with the precision of a surgeon.

Riffling through the man’s pockets, he finds thirty-eight cents in change, but more importantly, a set of keys to his battered Ford SUV.

He’s about to walk away when the boy appears, sucking his thumb.

The boy looks at the blood pooling around his father’s head.

“He’s not drunk this time, is he?”

“Sorry, kid. Some folks need to be dead. Your Dad was one of them.”

“That’s for sure. He was a rotten Dad.”

“I understand. Believe me, I get it.”

“My name’s Jude. I like pancakes. Will you take me to the diner?”

“…Yeah, sure… You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Of what?”

“Me, for starters.”

“You mean the way you look? Beauty isn’t in somebody’s face. It’s in their heart.”

***

Jude pauses from annihilating his stack of pancakes, looking up at him.

“Where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Disneyworld.”

“That’s a long way away. Do you have any family nearby?”

“My Uncle Max. He has two boys close to my age. They have a fort in their backyard.”

“Is Uncle Max a nice man?”

“The best. Much nicer than my Dad. He’s a police man.”

“Would you like to stay with Uncle Max?”

Jude nods yes. “What about you?”

“I’ll be all right. I’ve got somebody who can look after me.”

“Who?”

“Bessie.”

***

Jeremy Jorgenson’s SUV proves to be as useless as he was, conking out after seventy miles. He leaves it on the side of the road, procuring the BMW of the good Samaritan who stopped to help him while Jude slept.

Rubbing his thumb alongside the mahogany handle of his straight razor, he watches Jude reading a comic book.

A voice inside of him says, “The boy’s a witness. You know what has to be done.”

***

Kenyon stares in disbelief at the lab report.

“There were no fingerprints anywhere in the car?”

“Just Jude Jorgenson’s,” Laniyah replies. “I have some good news. The Straight Razor Slasher shouldn’t have changed horses in the middle of the river. We found a few hairs near the driver’s seat next to the victim’s body. The DNA sample belongs to this guy…”

Laniyah drops a folder on Kenyon’s desk.

Kenyon looks at the photograph of a handsome, dark-haired man and reads the news clips.

“Malachi Moore. A fearless hero whose face was disfigured in a fire. Must’ve burned his fingerprints off as well.”

“There’s at least a dozen straight razor murders that I bet connect to him,” Laniyah notes. “We’ll get him. It’s not like he’s inconspicuous.”

***

Kenyon approaches the Tranquil Twilight Lodge’s front desk.

“Is there a man registered here who’s disfigured?”

The disinterested clerk looks up from his Guns N’ Ammo magazine.

“Yep. Room A-11. He’s got some kid with him that I’m willin’ to bet ain’t his. What’s he done?”

“A lot of things he shouldn’t have.”

“Figures. I knew he was trouble when I laid eyes on him, and he signed in as Bill Smith. He’s got a face that’d make the Elephant Man stampede.”

***

Malachi peels back the curtains, looking out the window at the throng of unmarked police and F.B.I. vehicles charging into the parking lot.

A S.W.A.T. team creeps toward the door.

Malachi turns to Jude, who is absorbed in watching “SpongeBob Square Pants.”

“You stay here,” Malachi says.

“Where ya goin’?”

He puts on his leather jacket, taking out Bessie.

“I’ll be right back.”