Serpents in the Cold (12 page)

“How do you know?”

“Margo gave it to her. She gave me one just like it.” Holding the crucifix by its chain, he placed it back on the floor, let the chain loop over the cross. His chest felt tight and he fought to measure his breathing, but when he looked around at the hanging carcasses of meat, he could only see Sheila strung up, her arms raised and bound over one of the steel hooks, causing the ligature marks that Fierro had mentioned.

Cal crouched on his haunches, parted the clothing, and surveyed the ground. Blood spatter had turned the metal black. Dante knelt down beside him, touched the clothing he assumed was Sheila's, clutched the things in his hands, and then, strangely ashamed, dropped them back to the floor. When he stood, the tendons in his knees cracked.

Wind banged against the metal sides of the trailer, and the metal warped and bent and popped as if they were underwater and sinking deeper and deeper. Still on his knees, Cal cupped his hands to his mouth and tried to blow some warmth into them.

The trailer was a crime scene now. Sooner or later, he knew that they'd have to call Owen, something he didn't want to do until he and Dante had a little more to go on. Dante glanced at him and fumbled in his pockets for his lighter and cigarettes. He lit one and kept the lighter ablaze.

Beyond the hanging carcasses, shadows seemed to blur and tremble. Cal paused and held his breath, squinted through the rows of chains and meat, in the way he'd once stared and waited in the suspended light of a foreign dusk, waited for the enemy's approach. What the hell was he seeing?

The sounds of the dump yards were gone. Even the seagulls had gone silent. Only the soft rattling and metal tones of the lanyards and chains against the empty gleaming hooks and the softly swaying carcasses of cow.

They moved forward toward a thicker darkness, parting first one vinyl curtain and then another. Outside the wind thrust frozen snow beneath the trailer and it rattled and pinged beneath their feet. They parted the last curtain. Before them, the bodies of three women hung from meat hooks, their mouths in the final rictus of a terrible and tortured death, blood black on their frozen blue-hued skin. Cal put a hand to his mouth and turned away, but the image of them remained, of their splayed and contorted hips and their distended, naked bodies. Dante dropped his lighter and reached for him but Cal pushed his hand away. He was trying to find his way in the dark, and the sense of bodies pushed in on him so that he couldn't breathe. He stepped through the vinyl sheets and moved toward the trailer's doors, and then he was moving faster, feet banging the metal floor, hands searching and scrabbling for the doors, and then he was stumbling out onto the cold, welcome snow and on all fours, gagging, acid bile bursting from his mouth and spilling over his chin.

_________________________

THE CHEVY FLEETLINE
sat in the darkness before the wrecking yard beneath a soft dusting of new snow. Cal let down the car window, and cigarette smoke twined out into the night air. He sipped from a cup of old coffee, grimaced, and poured more whiskey into it, shaking the last drops from the bottle. He knew he needed to slow down, but since seeing the women's bodies he'd been unable to see much else, and only the drink blurred the edges of the nightmare. His hands trembled when he raised the cup to his lips, and he cursed them, wishing the whiskey had more of an effect.

Since discovering the trailer, he and Dante had said very little but seemed to have instinctively arrived at the same decision. They knew they had to call it in to Owen, and they knew that once that call was made, they were on the outside again. Even Fierro would have to put up a wall against them. They'd give it one night and see if anything came of it.

The Bruins game reverberated tinnily from the dark interior of the car. Woody Dumart had just split two defenders and, instead of passing to wide-open Peirson coming on the right wing, decided to take it himself as Bill Barilko straightened him up with a high cross-check. A fight ensued between the two, and now two other Bruins were fighting with Fleming Mackell at the top of the crease.

“That cheap bastard,” Cal said. “Send the fuck off!”

Dante lit another cigarette. The smell of butane hung heavy in the cold air. Cal watched him staring at the flickering flame, the cigarette smoldering in his hand. Dante clicked the lighter shut, then popped it open again, stared at the small fire-glow. Cal pursed his lips and tried to ignore him.

“Cut it out, would you?” he said after a moment. He shifted in his seat, sneezed, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and squinted through the glass. “We've lost this fucking game,” he said. “Our offense is for shit.”

He reached over Dante for the extra pint of whiskey he kept in the glove compartment. He unscrewed the top and poured it into his inch of leftover coffee, held it out for Dante, who shook his head.

The far lights of Moon Island receded as he watched. The windshield was freezing over again. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine hesitated at first and then, grudgingly, rumbled into life. He waited for the engine to warm and then turned on the heater. After a while the glass cleared, and Cal killed the engine again. The game was over. He owed Charlie a fin. The radio spat with static and Cal switched it off.

He sipped his coffee. The hours passed. Ragged men passed in and out of the trailers they called home. The Boston skyline glittered like distant cold stars. Cal's eyes tracked a black shimmer of water from one of the pumping station sluices as, undulating, it flowed into the bay. He turned the radio back on and tuned the station to a soft piano jazz ballad. When the song ended, the deejay's voice sounded as if coming from a great distance, deep timbred and warm, barely above a spoken whisper.

Dante yawned, stretched his arm forward, pulled back his coat sleeve, and by the dim light of the radio checked his watch, squinting.

“It's two o'clock,” he said. “Nothing's happening tonight.”

Cal shrugged.

“I'd rather be at the Rialto watching Rocky Lane.”

Cal blew smoke at the ceiling, rubbed his upper lip with a knuckle. “What was that last one he did?”

“Vigilante Hideout.”

“I liked
Frisco Tornado
myself.”

“
Gunmen of Abilene
was his best so far.”

“Didn't think much of that one.”

Cal studied the trailers and then the pasture. He turned in his seat and watched the far and few lights of cars speeding along the highway toward the city. Across the channel the lights of barges bobbed and dipped. He rolled his shoulders, put the window back down to let some cold air in.

Cal stared at the old neighborhood below the South Street Bridge leading to the city. The hulking black shapes of warehouses and factories, J&B Storage and Old Colony Meats, a nineteenth-century abattoir still in use. During the summer months the mewling and lowing of cattle about to be slaughtered used to reverberate down the channel to his parents' tenement on Cardinal Ryan Way. That was before they'd moved to Fields Corner. When he asked his mother what the sound was, she told him it was an Irish wake farther down the avenue. During that summer when he was ten, he heard it most every night, as if people were always dying, for the Irish were always having wakes.

Dante raised the binoculars again, panned the Mile Road. “Why'd you think someone's going to show? Even that bum said the guy hadn't been back in days.”

“For shits and giggles, I don't know. It's how this guy gets his kicks. He can't stay away.”

“Yeah, but why tonight?”

“It might be tonight, it might be tomorrow night. It might be next week. But he's kept the bodies in the trailer—”

“All except Sheila's.” They hadn't mentioned her name since they'd seen the trailer, and Cal paused with his cup before his lip.

“—all except Sheila's, right, but he's kept the bodies in the trailer for a reason. Until he kills another girl, I think he'll keep using them.”

Dante grimaced, shook his head. Frustrated, he mashed his cigarette into the overflowing ashtray.

“Do me a favor and dump that out, would you? My car's starting to smell like a crematorium.”

“Hold up. What's
he
doing?”

Cal followed Dante's eyes and looked toward the rows of trailers. A bum had pulled down his pants and, hands between his legs cupping his balls against the cold, squatted on his haunches on the far side of the trailers by the wheel wells. The wind whipped his oversized coat about him.

“He's taking a shit.”

Dante stared at the man through the binoculars, his brow creasing in concentration.

“Jesus. Let the man take a shit in peace, would you.”

After a moment Dante grunted, laid his head back against the headrest, and closed his eyes. Wind moaned through the rusted towers of crushed cars, whistling high then low. The chain-link fence rattled. Cal finished the pint of whiskey, rolled the window back up, and turned the engine over again, allowing heat to fill the car. His head felt thick and heavy. The dashboard radio glowed warmly in the dark. Cal's head jerked on his neck and he swore, inhaled deeply, and forced his eyes open. It took him a moment to see the car with its lights off making its way slowly across the rutted gravel from the Mile Road and between the darkened shacks. Cal tongued his gums and killed the engine, rolled down his window again so that cold air filled the car. Dante didn't move, but his eyes were open and he was staring at the approaching car. Slowly, he raised the binoculars.

“Our man,” he said.

“Maybe.”

The car, a long-bodied black Lincoln, circled wide and slow before the shuttered and wrecked trailers. It passed beneath the wrecking yard's single halogen lamp and was illuminated, light slipping across its metal like a fish moving through water. Smoke curled white from twin tailpipes, and then it moved though darkness again and pulled in before the farthest abandoned trailer.

Cal and Dante watched the smoke steaming from its exhaust and then the smoke stopped, the driver's-side door opened, and a man climbed out. His footsteps broke the thin surface of ice that had covered the snow and the sound of it came to them.

“Scarletti?” Cal said.

“I don't think so, not the way the bum described him. This guy looks much smaller. Give me a second. I'm waiting for him to step into the light.”

Cal leaned closer and stared into the dark, trying to see what Dante was seeing. The man wore a black watch cap pulled low over his head and a long black leather jacket that seemed to shine wetly in the light, its collar raised to protect his neck. He stepped through the snow, the meager glow of a flashlight bobbing before him, and moved without hurry toward the trailer containing the dead women. He knew where he was going all right. Cal realized he had been holding his breath, and exhaled long and slow. The figure reached up to the padlocked chain, and paused. He realized the seal had been broken, and turned, alarmed—the beam of his flashlight arcing crazily through the dark—and Cal flicked on the car's headlights. For a brief moment they could see his face fully and saw that it was Blackie Foley.

Dante lowered the binoculars and surprise hissed through Cal's teeth. Something held the both of them in their seats even as the figure darted from the trailer, and then Dante shouted, “Gun it!” but Cal was already stomping on the accelerator and releasing the clutch, the rear tires of the Fleetline spinning for traction, snow and frozen gravel banging in the wheel wells and digging craters in the snow beneath them. The Fleetline fishtailed to the left and right as they sped toward the trailer. Cal's heart hammered in his chest and nausea swirled in the pit of his stomach. It was the type of fear he'd felt in the war.

At the last moment he locked the car's high beams on the trailer, cut the wheel to trap the Lincoln, momentarily catching a black figure racing toward the car, and then a gunshot sounded and the windshield fractured before them. Glass sprayed their faces, and Cal ducked to shield his eyes, even as he pressed the car forward.

“The fuck!” he shouted, and jammed the gearshift upward, gearbox grinding. The engine screeched. With head lowered to the console, he tried to see through the spiderweb of cracked glass, and then sensing even as he realized it was too late that the tires were floating, riding above the ice, and that they'd lost traction and were gliding forward out of control. “Goddammit!” he hollered as the Fleetline began to turn in a wide pirouette, so at first they were moving alongside the Lincoln—they could see the blurred dark shape of the driver at the wheel through frost-covered glass, and then the Lincoln was roaring backward, barreling across the frozen gravel toward the gates of the yard, its exhaust mushrooming blue—and then they were turned away from it, the rear of the Fleetline like a missile careening toward the sloping drop into the sewage canal.

The Lincoln's retreating headlights momentarily blinded them as they spun. Cal stomped hard on the brakes, held them, and cut the wheel against the spin, released the brake, and wrestled the wheel back. It altered their direction and spun them hard into a wide snowbank. The car shook and the engine whined and then stalled. Cal hunched over the wheel, kept his foot to the pedal as he turned the key again and again until the engine roared into loud, frantic life, air popping in shotgun bursts from the manifold and tailpipes and the heady smell of oil and gasoline filling the interior of the car. Cal popped the clutch, and they spun out of the yard and up the Mile Road. The Lincoln was a distant blur of red taillights growing fainter and fainter, the sound of its engine revving at the top coming to them briefly on the frozen air. “You ain't getting away, you fuck,” Cal said through gritted teeth. With his legs pressing down, Dante steeled himself against the seat as the car's acceleration forced his head back, wincing as he picked at the tiny bits of bloodied glass imbedded in his cheeks.

THEY CHASED THE
black Lincoln into Boston proper, Cal squinting all the while through the shattered glass, his lips pressed together. It seemed as if he was holding his breath, and but for the flush of blood now seeping to his ears, nose, and cheekbones, Dante wondered if he was breathing at all. The cold wind rushed at their faces and made their eyes tear. The car hit a pothole and shook violently. Bits of glass came away from the window frame and with a slight tinkling fell about the car. The Lincoln was still there ahead of them. Dante could just make out its taillights, its sleek black body as it passed beneath the streetlights. Cal pushed the engine as hard as he could and the Fleetline lowered its heavy body to the street, the chassis trembling.

Cal reached into his jacket, pulled his gun from his holster, and dropped it across the car seat. Dante looked down at it and then up at him. Cal's eyes widened in exasperation. “I can't shoot and drive at the same time. Pick up the fucking gun, it won't bite.”

The Common passed on their right, the blurred impression of wrought iron railings, bare and gnarled trees, snow the color of pearl, then the Public Garden, the frozen pond with the Swan Boats beneath their black tarps, and the statue of Colonel Thomas Cass, commander of the Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry rising triumphantly upon his horse.

Cal cut left across a lane of late-night traffic, which seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, and amid the blaring of horns and bright sparks of metal upon metal the car careened over the streetcar tracks before the glare of an oncoming trolley. In the Theater District he swerved into an alley that let out on Wilbur and then back onto Tremont. He kept his eyes between the road and the Lincoln ahead but they were losing ground. They came over the hill on Massachusetts Avenue, Roxbury with its staggered rows of decrepit and crumbling brownstones stretching before them, and suddenly there was no sign of the car.

Cal glanced in the rearview, looking to the curbs and openings of side streets, checking to see if the Lincoln might have pulled over and killed its engine, waiting for them to pass, or else might have done a roundabout and come up behind them. After a moment he shook his head. “Fuck, we've lost him.”

Finally he pulled over, banged open his door, and clambered out, and Dante exited on his side, gun hanging in his hand. Cursing, Cal slammed the metal roof with his fists and then lowered his head, stretched his arms against the roof of the car. The engine idled and coughed as if it might quit altogether. Smoke from its exhaust moved about them heavy and slow, like everything else in the cold. After a moment Cal looked up. Dante was staring at him expressionless and pale, looking as if he might vomit. “This can't be for real,” he said.