He’d sicked up all over the place that morning and made a big racket over something he’d seen in the paper. The rest of them had tried to calm him down, but nobody would tell her what it was about when she’d come out of the bedroom. She’d make Terry tell her later, but for now she didn’t know. And then they’d all gone out. She went to take a shower, and when she was done the cars weren’t there.
It was when she’d finally shut the last window unit off that she heard it, the low hum of a running vehicle coming from the garage. The odd thing was, they never used the garage, there was too much crap in there to park inside, and any work on the cars took place down at Rubber House where there were countless Latino mechanics to do dirty work like oil changes. The sound of the engine grew louder as she reached the door and opened it. A cloud of exhaust and horror hit her and she staggered and pressed the button raising the door to the outside. Household junk had been pushed to one side to accommodate Dean’s Magnum. Fresh air flooded in as she crossed to the driver’s side of the car, where a figure was pressed against the window. Even distorted like a horror-movie monster because of the plastic bag stretched over his head she could see it was Dean, her boy, his face bright red and lifeless…
“This is it,” Behr said into the phone as he raced toward the Speedway address. “I got you what you wanted.”
“Linkage,” Pomeroy said.
“That’s right, by witness statement. A shake girl.”
“Schlegel?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the girl?” Pomeroy asked, and Behr gave him the location.
“They don’t know where she is-,” he added.
“I’m gonna pick her up anyway,” Pomeroy said.
“Good idea.”
“And you?”
“On my way to the home address-”
“Behr-”
“I’ve got something to settle.” Behr turned off Crawfordsville Road and onto the Schlegel’s street and started scanning house numbers.
“Your friend? Let’s not get stupid here-”
“It’s more personal than that now.”
“Behr!”
But Behr hung up on him and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He saw the rambling house he was looking for at the end of the block. It was fairly well kept, with a slightly yellowed yard and a chain-link dog run poking out from around the back. The garage door was open and a slender blond-haired woman was pounding on the driver’s side door of a Dodge Magnum and screaming. Behr rolled into the short driveway, jammed his car into park, and paused. The woman didn’t seem to notice him as she began to yank on the door handle, but the door appeared to be locked. Her head whipsawed around the garage, and she moved to a workbench. She ran her hands over a pegboard, selecting and discarding car keys. Now Behr got out of his car and watched as she scrabbled around the loose tools on the bench and came up with a wooden mallet. She went to the Dodge, which Behr could hear was running, and began pounding on the driver’s-side window. He noticed a shop-vac hose taped over the tailpipe and running into the cracked rear passenger-side window. The heavy odor of exhaust was in the air. Behr crossed the driveway toward her as the driver’s-side window shattered, the safety glass pebbling into a thousand pieces. Mad piano, baroque guitars, machine gun drums, and a distinctive voice playing on the car radio spilled out of the gaping hole. Behr recognized the song. It was Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.” A bereft wail escaped the woman as she reached inside, opened the car door, and a body slumped out.
The kid was dead, that much was clear enough. After a moment, Behr eventually recognized him as the same one he’d followed from Flavia Inez’s old building. It took him a moment because the man had a plastic bag secured over his head that the woman tore away revealing his face, cherry-colored thanks to the carbon monoxide poisoning. The woman had slumped to her knees by the time Behr approached and she looked up at him with dazed and distant eyes. She began backing away across the cement floor of the garage. Behr extended what he hoped was a calming hand.
“Ma’am,” he said. It seemed to ignite her. She leaped to her feet and bolted inside the house. Behr took a look back over his shoulder. No units were responding as of yet, and if sirens were sounding in the distance the operatic rock music blasting out of the car stereo was drowning them out.
Shit, Behr sighed, and headed inside the house after her. He didn’t have much choice, and he went quickly because he didn’t know what he’d find waiting for him in there and didn’t want to give her time. He moved down a hallway, the house silent around him. He came upon her in the kitchen. Her eyes flashed with hatred. Her feet, shod in sneakers, squeaked on the linoleum floor as she came at him, slashing, with a boning knife.
Rush in. Close the distance. Get inside striking range.
The staccato thoughts of what he was supposed to do when facing a knife screamed across Behr’s cortex. But instead, he found himself leaping backward, instinctively trying to clear the weapon in the other direction. It was a mistake. She cut him on the outside of the left forearm, and he felt the cold burn immediately. The floor would soon be slick with blood, difficult to keep his balance on, his hand perhaps not functional if she’d nicked a tendon. The pain woke him up to the fact that this was real, and as she stumbled forward for another strike, Behr set his feet and drilled her in the face with a straight right. The shot caught her flush on the cheekbone and sounded a loud crack. Her feet ripped up and out from under her and she landed flat on her ass and her head went back and hit the kitchen floor. Behr felt something for the blonde, laid out there, what looked to be her son dead in the garage, but he stuffed it down deep and kicked the knife away. He checked his arm. Blood was seeping from a three-inch slash, but the wound wasn’t deep. He grabbed a dishtowel and wrapped the arm before checking the rest of the house. The rooms were all empty. He discovered the woman’s purse on her unmade bed, rifled it, found her cell phone, which he snapped in his hands. He took the battery for good measure and returned to the kitchen, where the woman was stirring slightly and moaning on the floor. He considered waiting for her to come out of it and questioning her but didn’t want to invest the time or get entangled with the responding officers. On his way from the house he ripped out the telephone landline where it fed in by the side of the open garage door that held the car and the dead kid, and then he was back in his car. He placed a call to Pomeroy’s cell phone, but it rang through to voice mail. He left a message of what the police would find at the Schlegel residence, and though he knew he should stop, pull over, turn off his car, and call it a day, he signed off by saying: “I’m heading for the husband’s work addy.”
Where the fuck is everybody? Terry Schlegel wondered, closing his phone. He’d called them all in succession. Charlie, Kenny, Dean, and Vicky. It was like some kind of cell phone outage, Terry thought, as he dialed into the AMSEC safe that was set in the floor of his office at the garage. The only one whose location he had locked down at the moment was Knute, who would be coming by in a few hours once he’d met up with the Chicago guys. Fifty- seven thousand in cash was what he had in the safe. He’d have seven left in his pocket when it was done. It seemed like a good time to carry extra cash, as he’d be needing it to take a powder for a while. He filled a small tool bag with the rubber-banded bills. Beneath the money was the stainless Smith amp; Wesson. 40 caliber Charlie had given him a while back. Some might have thought it a strange gift, but that was the kind of family they were- they did things their own way, they had their own kind of closeness-and if people didn’t understand it, they could go fuck themselves. Terry checked the clip on the Smith, racked the slide, and tucked it in his belt. He was closing the safe when there was a knock at the door.
“Yeah?” Terry called out.
“Boss?” It was Raul, his shop foreman.
“Come on,” Terry yelled, standing up. The door opened. Raul was standing there, and beyond him was a flash of blond hair and skinny legs in tight faded jeans.
“You got a visitor,” Raul said, his tone and his expression blank.
That’s ’cause he’s smart, Terry thought. He knows better than to come smirking around my office. The foreman cleared and revealed Kathy, that little girl from the bar who went to high school with Kenny. She’d boned how many of his sons? He didn’t care, and neither did they. He’d brought her to the garage that night not long ago. He was usually pretty good with the discipline, but the blond hair, the little slip of a body, the jut of her chin that spoke of her tough attitude-it all put him in mind of Vicky when she was young. This Kathy, with the hundreds of
