Through a clearing, I caught the full moon in my eyes. The moon was pure white, save the spots of gray that dotted its pale and powdered face. I thought it was heaven, seeing that pearly moon fill the sky. I knew that somewhere, somehow, my Doris was looking at that same, plump moon, watching it with her beautiful blue eyes, wondering where I was, and hoping against all hope that I was safe.
In the blink of an eye, the moon turned from white to silver. My hysteria broke long enough for me to scream, because the pain of a thousand deaths had hit me. I saw my hand explode from the wrist down, and there was something else underneath it, but I didn’t know what. A moment later, I was gone.
I came back to the States not long after, not knowing what had happened that night, not knowing what to tell the brass about how I had survived the firefight. I thought I was crazy. They did too, which was why they sent me back.
I shouldn’t have come back. My father never should’ve had children. When he
Alice walked out the front door and shuffled down the block toward her Honda. She got in, made a turn, and headed north toward home. I followed. It was just after four in the morning.
Once her front door closed behind her, I drove home, slept for a couple of hours, and got up a little after six to get ready for work myself. I was exhausted, but there was no rest for the wicked.
That night I would do the same thing all over again.
Midnight again on Carpenter Street.
With every car that pulled up to see one of the girls in the house, there was the possibility he was a sick and sadistic killer. I kept my eyes open for a car with out-of-state plates, but they all looked local to me. As far as I knew, there wasn’t even any proof that the Rose Killer had set foot in Mama Snow’s. He very well could have come upon Josie Jones on the street somewhere, or at a coffee shop, or a red light.
Too many variables. It had never been my fucking forte to consider variables. I was a broad-strokes kind of guy, and yes, I can admit it now, it all made my head hurt.
It occurred to me that instead of the killer being from out of town, he very well could have been a local man who traveled around the world to do his dirty work. In that case, he would have been working too close to home now, which means he would have snapped recently, not caring anymore if he got caught. Or maybe he was just plain crazy. Was there anyone in town who fit the bill?
As if lightning had struck me dead in the brain, I no longer saw the darkened street ahead of me, but the outside of a dilapidated house somewhere not far away. I was experiencing another one of Pearce’s memories….
Pearce approached the house slowly. Not because he was afraid—the resident wasn’t known to be especially violent—but because there was so much to take in. The resident’s lawn was painted green. Not a single blade of grass grew. It was literally all green paint thrown across the bare dirt.
Pearce laughed, and before knocking on the door with his big, hairless knuckles, he peeked in through one of the broken windows. He could see a room painted blue in the space between the curtains. Up on the wall was one of those ridiculous posters seen in schools all across the country—a little kitty cat hanging by its paws from a clothesline or some such thing. The caption read
“HANG IN THERE!”
Pearce sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy.
Just then, the sun broke out from behind a squadron of clouds, and whereas the room once shone to him through the window, it was now obscured. All he could see was his face in the reflection. He looked at himself and smiled, curious to see how young he looked just then, even though he seemed tired around the eyes.
How strange it is, how a man spends his life looking in a mirror, only to think he will be the only person to ever see what he sees.
I see it too, if I just so happen to kill you.
Pearce stepped back to the door to the house and hammered it with his fist. Immediately following that, he stepped to the side and rested his hand on the gun latched on to the side of his duty belt. If the tenant was crazy enough to start blazing away, Pearce didn’t want to get shot through the door. It’s what he was trained to do.
Several long seconds passed. Pearce was about to knock again when the door creaked open.
“Hey, Officer,” said Crazy Bob. “Everything okay?”
Crazy Bob was wearing a pair of dirty blue jeans and a wife beater. He was covered from head to toe in green paint. He was, needless to say, the guilty party. “Bob, right?”
“You got that right. What can I help you with?”
“Well,” said Pearce, “your neighbors thought I should come by to see how you’re feeling.”
“I feel marvelous,” said Crazy Bob. “Fantastic, even. Never better in my life.”
Pearce cleared his throat and stepped closer.
“We’ll see about that,” said Pearce.
As suddenly as I had been forced into another man’s memories, I found myself back behind the wheel on Carpenter Street. I lit another cigarette.
Before I knew what I was doing, I started the truck and was heading south. I knew where Crazy Bob lived. And they didn’t call him Crazy Bob because he was the most predictable motherfucker in the world, either.
Picture, if you will, all the times you’ve driven through a really nice neighborhood in your life. The kind of neighborhood where in the winter months the Christmas decorations outside the houses will be elaborate and expensive. Where in the summers, boats are parked in the driveways. Where, through the windows, you could see the people who live there have honest-to-God chandeliers in the house, like at a fucking opera house or something. Now picture on this beautiful, upscale kind of block a single house that looked like it had been strafed and bombed by a fleet of F-16s.
That would be Crazy Bob’s house. I passed it in the truck, saw there was a light on inside, kept driving, parked on the corner, and walked back.
Because of Pearce’s memories, I felt as if I’d already been there, but I never was. It was very dark, but I could see that there were some patches of grass growing up on his lawn—a drastic shift from when Pearce had visited the place years earlier. I walked over the lawn to the window that Pearce had once looked in. It was just around the side, and, coincidentally, it looked into the one room that was lit from the inside. I was shocked by what I saw through the curtains.
The room was painted bloodred, and a bare lightbulb hung from a wire in the cracked ceiling, swinging back and forth like that scene in
Crazy Bob’s back was to me. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a dirty T-shirt. His beer gut hung over his pants like a threat. In his right hand was a six-gun. A Magnum, by the looks of it. I swallowed.
Seated before him was a naked woman coated with sweat. Her legs were long and her breasts were just short of gargantuan. One of them had a red dot on it. That was blood, which ran in a fine trickle from her heavy lower lip. She was blond, and had enough makeup on to be mistaken for a member of Kiss. Regardless, it was apparent that the woman needed some saving from this madman. I would not let another woman die by this monster’s hand. I presumed those were her clothes littered about the floor, only because they were surely too small for our friend Bob.
I had not anticipated anything actually going down when I swung by the lunatic’s house. I merely wanted to do some recon. This, however, was not going to be recon. I wished I had brought a disguise, but then I figured it probably didn’t matter. The chances were fair that no one was going to make it out of that house alive anyway.
I snuck to the back of the house. There was a door back there that led into the kitchen. I jiggled the doorknob, and the door opened silently. I breathed in deep and stepped in.
The stench hit me first—the smell of roaches. Then I heard Crazy Bob—thought to be harmless all these years—quoting scripture. Some business about the end times.
