SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (67 page)

“I don't want to talk about it anymore. I have to leave or I'll be late.”

“Shadow?”

“What?”

“This may be God's way of saving us.”

Shadow began to laugh sarcastically and then she stopped abruptly. Charlene needed something from her, something from life she had never found. If there wasn't enough there—and there wasn't!—then she needed God, and so be it. “Maybe,” she mumbled, moving into the hall, and for the front stairs.

“Won't you think about it?” Charlene called after her.

And what do you think I've been doing, Shadow wanted to say. I am, I am, she wanted to shout. Why is everyone pressuring me, she wanted to scream. But she said nothing and pulled the door closed softly behind her as she left the house.

~*~

Son watched from a distance. He was there, parked on the street, when she came to work. He was there hours later when she came from the Blue Boa's exit door at the back of the building and walked to her car.

His belly tightened and he sat straighter in the driver's seat. His buttocks were numb and he was terminally bored from sitting, waiting. But now that his sacrifices might pay off, he didn't care.

She drove a few blocks away and turned into a Kroger parking lot. He drove past, then around the block and, cruising by again, he saw she had parked. There was a man at her driver's side window. He was bent over at the waist, talking to her.

Son saw a dark house with a gravel driveway next to the grocery store parking area. He pulled into it and killed the headlights. He could see Shadow's car from where he sat. He brought his thumb to his mouth and gnawed at a hangnail. What did this mean, her meeting someone again at a place away from the club? This time he'd tail her. He'd find out for sure if she were the killer or if it was the crazy woman she lived with or someone else she worked with as a team player.

Maybe it was where she made arrangements for prostitution. He wouldn't be surprised. Most of the dancers in those clubs were for sale when the price was right. But he suspected this was something else, he could feel it in his bones.

He saw the man circle Shadow's car and get in the passenger's side. He reached over and placed his fingers on the ignition key. Shadow backed from the parking spot, drove around the lot and out the exit. When she reached the stoplight at the corner, Son started his car and followed her.

~*~

“Hotel California” by the Eagles was playing on the radio. Shadow listened to the lyrics rather than the inane babblings from her passenger. In the Hotel California you could check out any time you wanted, but you could never leave. Hadn't she created a Hotel Texas in the Shoreville mansion?

Her passenger would never leave.

He had come to her table around one a.m., an hour before closing. He was overweight and sweating. He kept mopping his doughy, red face with a white-linen handkerchief. She saw the tattoos that ended just before the cuffs of his long-sleeved, white shirt. She reached out and took his wrist. She said, "These are interesting. How far up do they go?”

“They're all over my body.”

“Didn't that hurt?”

“Not too bad.”

She inclined her head to peer closer. It appeared the tail of a snake was woven around his wrist. Then, turning his hand a little, she saw a swastika tattooed between his thumb and forefinger. “What's this? You a Nazi?”

She had said it as a joke, but his eyes changed to a troubled gray. “No,” he said.

“Then what does this mean?” She rubbed her thumb over the swastika.

“I'm a white supremacist. I don't like anyone who isn't white. You don't have any nigger blood in you, do you?”

She felt her heart grow leaden. It was a sudden sensation that was suffocating, as if an elephant had sat on her chest. She thought of Mom in the dressing room and what this man might do to her if he caught her alone in an alley. “No,” she said, “I'm mostly German.”

That pleased him, as she had calculated it would. He began shoveling money into her palm. The more he gave her, the more she hated him. She wanted to tell him that he wasn't white, who was? He was filthy, muddy, no-true-color and his blood was a gray-water pollution; his ancestors were fucking apes who didn't have the sense to come down from the trees. His kind made her want to gnash nails between her teeth and spit them out crumpled as foil paper.

“Are you in the local KKK?” She asked this just to wheedle at his self-image.

“I don't talk about things like that,” he said.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I run a landscape service company.”

She knew he employed only whites—trashy uneducated whites who cut grass for him and raked leaves. Whites who hated colored skin as much as he did.

“You're awful dark or maybe it's these lights in here,” he said. “Germans are blond. You sure you don't have some spic or wop in you? With that black hair and all . . .”

Shadow shrugged. “I can leave if you want me to.” She made to stand from the table. He grabbed her wrist.

“No, wait,” he said. “You're the best-looking gal in here. You say you're German, that's all right with me. Even the Führer had dark hair.”

She sat again. She listened to his hate-mongering babble. She weaseled admissions of violence against other men out of him he might not have made had she not threatened to leave him alone at the table. He came from a long line of white supremacists. He had lived most of his life in Vidor, Texas where they had kept blacks completely out of the town until only recently when, by court order, a housing development had had to abide by the law. His grandfather had formed the first KKK branch in the area. His great-grandfather had owned slaves and died fighting the Yankee carpetbaggers who not only took his landholdings, but courted away his wife and daughters too.

He had killed his first nigger when he was seventeen, he said, not bragging, but stated as a simple fact. At nineteen he beat a Mexican-American to within an inch of his life and left him crippled and wheelchair-bound.

Had he ever had relations with someone other than a white woman? she asked of him.

“Not once! I wouldn't dirty my hands. I'd vomit if I tried to do something like that,” he said vehemently. “But I've cut enough of the bitches so they won't be making anymore of those fucking nappy-headed brats. I've done that, by God.”

He told her all these things in a low, conspiratorial voice. He truly thought he had found in her a sympathizer. He so easily bought her lie that she was of German ancestry. Which just went to show how much intelligence he had at his disposal.

He was stupid—though racists, in her book, could be nothing other than stupid.

And this man was more.

He was incredibly, utterly evil and, although he had no suspicion, he was not long meant for this world.

~*~

Son parked where he had the last time he'd followed Shadow to the mansion. He left the car and sneaked up to the house until he was on the wide front porch watching through the windows. He couldn't see anyone—not Shadow, not the man she had brought home, nor the crazy woman who had met him at the door asking about her cat.

He sat down with his back to the wall and waited. Again. He let his mind wander and entertained himself by trying to roll a quarter over his knuckles without dropping it into his lap.

It might have been an hour later—it could not have been longer because he had not managed to get the quarter to roll smoothly over two of his knuckles—when he heard voices, and turned to peek through the window. He saw the two women trying to carry . . .

a body

. . . something big and heavy, wrapped in a sheet and plastic liner. Shadow was cursing and the crazy woman was weeping. They both kept dropping the end of . . .

the body

. . . the burdensome cargo. He pressed closer to the glass to be able to hear the conversation inside. He clutched the quarter tightly in the palm of his hand. Dizzy excitement caused him to breathe rapidly, shallowly.

“You said this wouldn't happen again . . .” That was the crazy woman and she sounded heartbroken. He could see her face was wet with tears and splotched red from crying. She looked as insane as the woman in that old movie, what was it? Snake Pit! Was that Rita Hayworth? Or maybe it was . . .

Shadow shouted, “Lift his feet! I'm going to drop the son of a bitch right here if you don't try to help me.”

“We could have moved out of here if you hadn't . . .”

“I'm never gonna get this bastard out of the house.”

“I think we need to call the doctor for you, not me. You have to stop . . .”

“He's a fucking monster!” Shadow screamed.

“I hear him and he says he is not a monster. He never did nothing . . .”

“He did too! You didn't hear him, Charlene, you don't know. And you don't hear him now.”

“But I do hear him . . .”

“Shut up and lift him, goddamnit, lift his feet. Damn!”

Son saw them make the corner on the landing and move through an opening into darkness. He immediately stood and raced down the stairs to the yard. He moved around the right side of the house. He fought his way through chest-high weeds to the green glass that rose two stories to a curving glass roof.

Was this a conservatory? An indoor greenhouse or arboretum? His feet sank into soft loam. A spider, a daddy-long-legs, walked up his forearm, and he swatted it off. He stood on tiptoe and peered through the glass. He smelled mildew on the brick siding. Light spilled from both ends of the glassed-in section inside. Starlight and moonlight shone in from overhead. He saw nearest him a brick maze, a marvelously strange configuration of paths weaving through brick that would have been higher than his waist if he had been inside it. On the other side he saw a glittering blue-green swimming pool. Between and high up he could see the metal catwalk connecting the front and back of the building. There he saw the two women struggling to transport the . . .

body

. . . heavy burden.

He watched with shining eyes, startled, but thrilled. The dancer killed the floaters they kept finding in the bay. He had proof. He knew now for certain.

Was that why the cop hung around her? Did he suspect too? Oh God, he hoped not. The game was just beginning. He didn't want her caught yet. He had only had one turn and if she were caught soon, he would have no time to commit another murder. The thought seized and held him, taking away his breath.

They were at the far end of the catwalk, having dropped . . .

the body

. . . what they were carrying, several times before getting it across. When they disappeared into that end of the house, he pushed from the side and started toward the back to see where they exited into the moonlight.

It took them a long time to get the body down the steps and across the short lawn to the dock, then down the dock, and into a small boat with an outboard motor. Shadow continued cursing and the crazy woman cried, while Son sat in the shadows, hidden by weeds, contemplating and relishing the scene of the crime.

A peace that he had not experienced in many years descended over him. He felt a kinship with the woman called Shadow and suddenly it occurred to him how perfectly matched were their nicknames, how fateful—she was the shadow and he the sun (son!). They were the two elements that ruled the world—the light and the dark, the Yin and the Yang, the day and the night. They performed the duties others were too afraid and too weak to perform. They owned the lives of others and took them at will. She led him and he followed, sun chasing shadow.

He smiled at the coincidence, but sobered when he thought that perhaps there was no such thing as coincidence in the world. It was destined, perhaps preordained, that they meet and become partners, dancing together, leading the band at Death's cotillion ball.

He had to stop this. Stop thinking in metaphors, like a stupid novelist. This was a deadly serious business, his main business. To wrap it in literary gauze and bury it deep in flowery language was to separate it from the real world where he knew what he was about and what the world really needed. He could not afford to pretend this was anything other than willful and premeditated murder, death of the first order, and that he needed all his wits to deal with it.

He stayed, growing damp with dew and bitten by mosquitoes, while the crazy woman re-entered the house, and Shadow took the small boat out into the waters. He waited until she returned, her great burden discarded. Watched while she wearily made her way up the pier, head hanging, arms limp at her side, and then on into the house.

He left tired, but replete, just as dawn broke with slow stealth, golden and rosy over Southeast Texas.

Thirty-One

On the day his mother died, Son killed his second victim.

He met the man in a bar across from the Blue Boa. He was as unlike the bum in the alley as the man in the moon. Young, clean-cut, earnest, and sober, he presented the ultimate challenge.

They sat at a back booth together talking football. Son faced the entrance to watch for the patrolling detective who worked the dives.

The young man, Clive Winnows by name, proved to be obsessive about the Dallas Cowboys. Son didn't give a shit about NFL teams, didn't really care about sports at all, but to keep the conversation lively he pretended to be a rabid Houston Oilers fan. In Texas, Cowboy fans disagreed vehemently with Oiler fans, and vice versa. The subject was always good grist for a heated debate.

“Moon should be replaced, man. He loses all the games for you.” Clive was not without intelligence. Son knew enough about football to know that the Oilers' quarterback, Warren Moon, was one of the best players in the league, but it appeared his age was telling on him. Maybe they'd trade him soon.

“I suppose some would say when Moon's hot, he's unbeatable, but like any other quarterback, when he's off his feed, there goes the ball game.” Son, working to get Clive's trust, would not deliberately alienate him, especially not about something as frivolous as sport.

They talked late into the night, the conversation spinning on first this sport subject and then that one. The bar was just a bar, a neighborhood place to hang out, not a strip club. They were not disturbed by loud music or agitated by naked women parading on a stage. The draft beer was cheap and cold.