The Wolfman

I slowly crept through the house. Mounds of plaster rested in the corners because the ceiling was caving in. I figured the house would collapse inside a year if it was left to its own devices. I could hear the woman breathing heavily.

I stopped at the open door to the red room.

Bob was calm, but I didn’t know how alert he was, or how quick he was with the six-gun. I wondered what it felt like to truly kill a man. I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out. Fuck it, I thought, and rushed him.

He didn’t see me coming. My right hook from hell sent him into the far wall, and he dropped the gun on the floor. The woman screamed. With Bob off balance, I drove a closed fist down into his gut, and he doubled up. I followed that up with some quick punches to the back of his neck, and then he was down. He didn’t even know what the fuck was going on. The heels of my cowboy boots did the job of knocking the motherfucker out cold. The woman screamed again.

I picked up the gun and trained it on the murderous sonofabitch on the floor.

“Stop!” the woman cried.

I turned to her. I had almost forgotten she was there.

“Are you okay?”

In retrospect, I guess it was pretty obvious. “No,” she said, “I am not okay! Don’t you dare shoot him! I love him.”

“What?”

“How could you do this to him?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know who this guy is?”

“He’s my husband,” the woman said. I lowered the gun. “Husband?”

“You killed my husband.”

“No, I didn’t. I almost did, but … I didn’t even know Crazy Bob was married.”

“He is. To me.”

This had not worked out the way I wanted it to.

“I thought … I thought he was the killer. I thought you were a captive.”

“He’s no killer. He’s harmless.”

It apparently didn’t matter to her that I was holding a loaded Magnum.

“This is how we roll,” she said. “And can you stop looking at my

tits?”

“Sorry.”

“You should be sorry.”

“I am,” I said. “I’ll just … I’ll let myself out.”

I had obviously made a horrible mistake—I seemed to be getting good at that. I had been so sure that I had been witnessing the murder of another innocent person, but it turned out to be, well, the way Crazy Bob liked to roll with his old lady.

“By the way,” I said, “where was the wedding?”

“There wasn’t one,” the woman cried. “We’re married in the eyes of the Lord.”

“Okay. How long?”

She thought for a second, then asked, “What day is it?” I hesitated before saying anything—just for comedic effect, because what else could I do—then said, “Forget I asked.” I snuck back out the back door and took the gun with me. Alice got home safe that night.

That was all very stupid of me, I admit that, but my heart was in the right place. I could only hope that Crazy Bob was crazy enough not to contact the law about my little bit of business with him. At least he was eliminated as a suspect in my eyes.

The next morning, there was an article in the paper that said a person of interest had been arrested the night before. I was giddy with joy; but by that evening my hopes had been squashed.

The police had picked up a bum in Applegate Park. They didn’t know who he was—he was one of these fellows who must have come into town on one of the freight trains—and they had found a bloody knife in his possession.

After what must have been a heated interrogation, the man admitted that what was on the knife was blood, but it belonged to a dog. He had killed one to eat. In his mind, he was performing a public service and getting himself fed at the same time. He led the police to the animal’s remains, and his story must have checked out because by nightfall he was no longer a person of interest, but he had been placed in Bonham’s—the hospital for the mentally degraded that rested far to the northwest and looked about as cheery as a tombstone.

Several days came and went with no good luck for anyone. The killer was still out there, and the only consolation was that no other bodies had turned up. Alice came and went from work under my watchful guard every night, but in my mind the temperature was rising, and it wasn’t just because the summer was upon us. There were ten days left until the next full moon filled the sky. Ten days left for the police to do their job. Ten days for me to find a needle in a haystack. Ten days left before someone died.

SIXTEEN

On the night of the thirty-first, Alice got to work at the same time as always, and, as usual, wasn’t visible to me in my truck until the time she stepped out the front door just after four in the morning. The streets were dead. You couldn’t even hear the crickets.

Alice said good night to Leon at the door, shuffled down the steps, and made a left at the curb. Her Honda was not parked on the block. In fact, it was parked two full blocks down. When she got to work that evening, there were several spaces she could have taken, but chose not to. I don’t know why. I could only presume that Mama Snow didn’t want so many cars on the block anymore. Maybe the police were giving her hell since Josie Jones died.

I was parked in my usual spot at the far end of the block, and I had a clear view of everything ahead of me. Alice was walking away from me on the opposite side of the street. Leon, instead of going back into the house right away, kind of watched her as she went down the block. I have to presume that he and I both saw the same thing at the same time.

At first it was nothing more than a shaking bush. Seconds later, a man in dark clothing emerged. Alice had passed the spot where he now stood just a few moments earlier, and was about twenty paces ahead of him. The man in black stood still on the sidewalk and watched her. Then he started to walk toward her.

I got out of the truck and closed the door just enough so no one would notice that it hadn’t locked. I didn’t make a sound. With Crazy Bob’s Magnum at my side, I rushed down the block.

Leon was doing the same thing, except he was such a hellish creation that he didn’t need a weapon—his pan-sized hands were practically designed by Reagan’s Star Wars program. Leon saw me across the street and stopped in his tracks. He must have seen the gun in my hand. I held out my hand for him to stop and then waved him back into the house. I didn’t want any witnesses. He wrinkled his brow, then nodded and went back to the house. He knew what I was doing.

I crossed the street silently. I tucked the gun into my pants. Up ahead, I could hear Alice’s high heels clacking on the sidewalk. She was oblivious to the man on her trail, and he was oblivious to me as I came up behind him, grabbed him by the collar, and punched him as hard as I could in the stomach. A rush of drunk air belched forth from his mouth, and he fell onto the closely cropped front lawn of a beautiful house. I knelt in front of him and raised the gun to his head. His eyes were crossed as they focused on the long barrel, the night-light shining off of it. I raised a finger to my lips.

“Shhh.”

I heard Alice’s footsteps halt as I knew they would. She had heard the man get hit. She must have turned, but saw nothing—the man and I were hidden from view by tall bushes. Soon, she went back to walking.

I waved the gun.

“Get up,” I whispered.