Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (10 page)

Not a few feet away opened two small bedrooms and a bathroom. On one of the beds, a lady’s purse had been emptied and its contents strewn wide. In the other room, two suitcases had undergone a similar search. The stench was a little stronger here. I looked under the bed, checked the closet, and then blinked in surprise at the small door blending nearly camouflaged with the natural wood paneling. When I opened it, the smell grew stronger, but still no bodies. It was a second bathroom—one you had to step down into, not raised against floods like the rest of the house. Naturally, I didn’t duck to avoid hitting my head as I stepped into it, and yeah, it hurt like hell. Squinting through the pain, I considered the closed door across from me.

When I opened it, it felt like I’d been punched in the soul as the smell of terror and death hit me. The hot room had become an incubator for the type of bacteria that fed on dead flesh. I felt like throwing up, but controlled it. I pulled my shirt over my nose and attempted the impossible task of both breathing and holding my breath, while a battle raged within to send me fleeing the room for the cleaner air of the house.

Mastering myself, I flicked on the light and stepped into a small garage, long since converted to a storage room. Two rolled-up tarps lay stacked near a tangle of rusty bicycles. A pair of feet extended from the larger bundle. I pulled back the material from where the head should be, revealing the face of an old man transformed into a mockery of youth through bloating, his face stretched taut against the firmness of his skull. No lingering expression remained from the time of death, only the gruesome spectacle of advancing corruption.

Now I fled the room, shutting both doors behind me and dry retching so hard my stomach hurt and my eyes watered.

“Dammit, I—”
Retch
. “Hate this—”
Retch
. “Shit!”

Cleaning up after other people’s messes was nothing new to me. In all things, I’m a practical person. I had to stay somewhere. I’m also a tidy person, and the shenanigans in the garage irritated me to no end. This is why I go to Home Depot for freezers, dammit.

I stepped outside again, passed the Grand Marquis and headed right, toward the water. With my senses dead to anything that didn’t reek sickly foul and noxious, the air smelled completely devoid of odor. As if someone had scrubbed the scent of tropical flowers and briny water from the undeserving world.

A little pier stretched about thirty feet out over the water. I knew it would be a fun place to fish in the mornings and wondered what was biting. At the same time, I wondered how hard the ground was and if there was a good shovel and pick in the garage. I also recalled a couple of promising fishing poles in there near where the bodies were. I’d have to try them out, either tomorrow or the next day.

“Christ,” I muttered, disgusted with myself.

Chapter 12

The neighbor’s house on the left was a big, two story single-family dwelling with an expensive-looking powerboat floating in a private slip. I spent the next hour digging a shallow grave in full view of anyone who felt like looking out a window. Then I dragged both corpses into it. To my right, reedy vegetation taller than the bungalow itself blocked out the big duplex on the other side of the street, so at least that wasn’t a worry.

My body was tired, and not just from the digging. It was sleepy too. The sky was lightening above the other shore and I still wasn’t sure where I was.

Finished, I gave the grave a final pat with the shovel and covered it with some lawn furniture. Part of me wanted to say a few words for the couple. If I were being honest, I wanted to
want
to say a few words, and wondered what that said about me. On the one hand, it suggested I knew they were going to a better place and were rid of this world, and thus whatever I said didn’t matter in the slightest. On the other, it confirmed my bizarre lifestyle had degenerated me so much I now longed for the good old days when death still appalled me.

My sense of smell was shot, so I couldn’t pick up the faint traces I knew still lingered. The reality of death might not be shocking to me anymore but it didn’t mean I enjoyed smelling it, and I didn’t want to breathe it all morning while I slept. Summoning a little more energy, I began opening windows to air the place out. With the bodies underground, I hoped the smell would dissipate by the time people started heading out for the day.

After my gruesome labors, my shower was more practical than ritual. As I toweled dry, I realized I still didn’t know what my ride looked like, but by that point, the mirror was so fogged I couldn’t see anything.

I took a moment to decide which room to sleep in, and then felt a wee bit guilty. Looking at the jigsaw puzzle of the English countryside, lovingly put together by this nameless old couple, I felt the first stirring of rage inside me. I may not have had words for them outside, but I did now.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll pay for it.” Nothing earthshaking, but it wasn’t for an audience. What’s more, I meant it.

I ended up taking the room on the left, where the purse had been emptied, it being farthest from the garage and all that bad karma. Never mind that I was closer to the shallow grave outside, and if that didn’t give me nightmares I didn’t know what would. And then I was too tired to care. After sweeping the contents back into the purse and setting it aside, I fell back onto the bed and kept on falling for quite some time.

***

When I awoke, it was to a sweaty bed and a brighter house. The clock on the nightstand showed 10:40 a.m. I lay there for a while, hoping to fall back asleep, but the more I waited the more I had to relieve my bladder. Groaning a little from muscles made stiff from digging graves during the wrong hours of the night, I got up and stumbled to the bathroom.

A minute later, I stood over the sink and had a look at my new face. Nothing spectacular. Late thirties, scraggly hair, scraggly beard and naturally blond. Tired looking eyes. He had three Japanese characters tattooed in a row along the left side of his neck. Though they weren’t as repugnant as Mike’s Nazi tattoos, their placement on his neck irritated me to no end. At least Mike’s were coverable. Now I had to pretend I didn’t notice every time someone looked at me and stared. Or looked at me and then away, for fear of getting caught staring. Or stared at me when I wasn’t watching, making me think people were staring at me when I wasn’t looking. No deep psychological inferences to be made there.

It occurred to me that some of the people I passed on the beach last night might have noticed the tattoos, even in the dark. If they learned there’d been a mugging on the beach it wouldn’t take any effort at all to drop a tip to the police. And if whoever they took away in that ambulance lived they’d have a great description to give the authorities. It all depended on where my ride had been standing in relation to the meager light coming from the street.

“Worry about it when it matters,” I said, and noticed my voice was a little raspy, as if from talking all night. A little thin and high. An irritating voice, just like his irritating tattoos.

The fridge was completely empty. Nothing in the freezer, either. The pantry had some coffee, but I needed something more substantial.

I retrieved the wallets I’d felt in my pockets the night before and searched them on the counter by the stove. One of the IDs looked like it could have been the old man—Andrew McHugh, from West Virginia. The other was a sandy haired guy named Stuart Barnes, from Michigan. I found a five and two ones in Stuart’s wallet, but Andrew’s was empty—both of cash and credit cards. The other wallet, also empty, belonged to a slight, blond-haired man with a big, smug grin on his face and Japanese characters tattooed along his neck. Kevin Richards of Odessa, Texas. Not even a driver’s license, just a state issued ID.

“Dammit,” I said. “This isn’t happening.”

Trying not to panic, I grabbed the purse from the bedroom and opened it next to the wallets. Her ID showed a smart looking woman in her seventies with a lust for life that matched her husband’s, but again I couldn’t find any credit cards or cash. Kevin had probably sold the credit cards for easy money or used them up to their limits.

I closed my eyes and did my normal inventory. I didn’t think I had any particularly scary addictions—nothing that would leave me half-dead for a week of detox, like heroin or crack. Digging a ditch should have tired me, sure, but I felt wiped out. If Kevin were an addict, I suspected either amphetamines or cocaine. Anything else and I’d be climbing the walls right now.

All I had was the $7 from Stuart. And if he had died, I couldn’t use his credit cards without about a hundred police officers parachuting in to arrest me. I just assumed it was Stuart’s blood I’d seen on the knife.

As for the amoral asshole, Kevin, he possessed exactly one pair of cutoff blue jeans, a ratty Ché t-shirt and some brand-new athletic shoes for those extreme athletes whose quest for a competitive advantage is never more than a knife wound away. The shoes even had little air pumps on the sides, I kid you not.

I made a thorough search of the house looking for hidden money, Travelers Cheques or food. I checked the car and came up with a sealed bag of red licorice from the glove compartment and immediately wolfed it down. I also found their rental agreement. The McHughs’ had the place for five weeks, with a departure date of August 22nd. I’d left Mike Nichols back in Tennessee on August 8th. Since any amount of time could have passed in the Great Wherever, I had no idea how long I had before a new couple showed up wondering what I was doing in their vacation house.

I had to deal with my immediate problem first: I needed food and money.

I took the Grand Marquis and drove exactly ten blocks before running into a little intersection with more than enough places to eat. Prepared food is expensive, but delicious, touristy food, most of all. I exercised a little discipline and pushed onward, eventually arriving at a bridge leaving the island. The sign on the far side, coming back, welcomed all to “Bradenton Beach, Santa Maria Island.” I wasn’t by the ocean at all—I was just off the Gulf of Mexico, in Florida.

A few minutes later, I passed a pricy-looking organic grocery with a bunch of nice cars in front and kept going until I found a barebones, no-frills store that looked like it catered to people who didn’t mind hormones and pesticides and other famine-eradicating marvels if it meant they could feed their family on a tight budget. The kitchen back at the house had plenty of pots and pans, so after much agonizing, I bought a box of spaghetti with no sauce. This would at least keep me from starving. The other thing I bought was a box of frozen shrimp sold as fish bait. But I wouldn’t be dining on shrimp tonight. With luck, there’d be fish to go with my sauce-free pasta.

That left me with a buck and change. I used that to return the car to just above the halfway point on gas. With great effort, I turned my gaze away from all the little pies lined up near the register.

Back at the house, I boiled half the spaghetti and ate it plain, hating it but killing my hunger over the course of the meal. The remaining half would serve in an emergency.

With nothing else to do, I grabbed a towel from the linen closet and went to the beach.

Chapter 13

The beach was packed. The sky hunched, overcast. A good thing, it being summer and the heat and humidity already climbing into the swampy regions. Countless families had staked out claims as far as I could see in either direction. If there had been a mugging the night before you couldn’t tell from the wide sprawl of frolic and leisure. Lots of beach umbrellas and skin and fantastically colored beach towels and bikinis and suntan lotion and tan lines and beach balls and basket balls and softballs and even some tennis balls, each known by various other names, most of them just as inventive and none of them all that polite. These are a few of my fa-vor-ite things.

I didn’t have a beach umbrella or any suntan lotion, but it wasn’t any skin off my back. Literally. Still, I didn’t want to spend the next few days peeling and sore, so I decided to limit myself to one quick swim and no more, just to get it out of my system.

I covered my keys and shoes with the towel, then set off toward the water across some of the smoothest, whitest sand I’d ever encountered. It felt wonderful under my toes. A little like dry mud, if that makes any sense. Molding my skin without scraping, surprisingly soft, yet not clinging any more than your garden-variety scratchy sand. That’s because it wasn’t sand at all, but the ancient skeletons of coral ground up by the tide over thousands of years and deposited here, grain-by-grain to massage the feet and cushion the backsides of the unwashed masses at the public beach. What can I say? Allegory’s a bitch.

The water churned silky and warm and cloudy near the surf—then crystal clear and a shade cooler after I swam farther out. Easily a hundred times more fabulous than that crummy old coral sand. Soft and velvety, lots of little bubbles, inspiring within me a profound sense of what poets call—
whoa!
Someone just lost their bikini top. I pretended not to stare, and pretty soon the show was over and it was just me and the crummy old saltwater again and I was laughing for no good reason.

Unlike the mere mortals on the beach, I had less to fear from sharks than they did. Sure, I didn’t like the idea of being eaten alive, but I knew the odds of a shark attack were incredibly long. The people on the beach knew it too, but none of them were going out past the invisible “deadly sharks!” line they all seemed to sense. They had something to lose. I sensed the invisible line as I passed it and swam another hundred yards, riding down the gentle waves and cresting the swells like I was born to it, taking little mouthfuls of seawater and spurting it out again as I went. When I needed rest, I rolled over and continued on my back.

After a while, I looked back toward the shore and noticed a lifeguard jumping around and waving at me to come back in.

“Screw you, copper,” I said and spurted some water at him. Then I dove down, swimming for the bottom and not finding it before I quit and had to come back up again. After breaking the surface, I couldn’t see the lifeguard anymore. That’s when I first noticed how tired I was. And I mean,
man
I was tired.