The cop who robbed graves and busted up caretakers had a slow, fairly uninteresting afternoon. Tires slashed down on Bergwall. A fist fight at a grocery store on Springs Road-shoplifter versus checkout girl, and the checkout girl was a bruiser with an undefeated record of eight and oh. And don’t forget the piece de resistance, a hit-and-run driver taking out three front yards on Rollingwood. Uprooted trees of various description and value, bashed mailboxes. Two victims-a ceramic troll and a cast-iron jockey.
Steve felt more empathy for the troll and the jockey than for the people he interviewed in conjunction with each call.
At least, that was what he told himself.
Griz Cody wished that the whole world were dark, because his hangover had him closed down good.
First off, he called in sick. No hassle there. But then his wife started bitching, and she was a pro. She made a special trip out to the garage just to check out his truck. She said that he better do something about it if he was going to stay home, cheesin’ off his job, because he wasn’t going to use her car. Not this time.
He didn’t mind her bitching. Not really. It meant he could spend the day in the garage. Nice and quiet out there. Cool cement and the greasy smell of tools. There was even a six-pack waiting in the old fridge.
He made the trip, had a couple brews. But he couldn’t shake his surly mood.
Damn truck. A big scratch zigzagged across the blue hood. Shutterbug’s projector did that. Busted headlight to go along with the scratch. Front left. The drive-in gate did that when he bashed through it.
But it wasn’t the truck that pissed Griz off. And it wasn’t his wife harping at him. The memory of last night ate at his guts. The damn movie ran through his brain, an ugly, unvarnished record of his impotence. A cold picture of him pinching that damn cheerleader while the other guys laughed looped through his thoughts like a snake crawling over one of those figure eight things.
A Moses strip, that’s what those things were called. And like that was part of the problem. On top of everything else, everybody thought that he was stupid. An egghead like Shutterbug probably thought that he didn’t even know what a Moses strip was.
Shit. All this stuff ruining his day. A hangover. The scratch on his truck, and the busted headlight. The guys laughing at him and his limp little dick. The Moses strip.
Him having an ugly wife-that was the Destino bitch’s fault, too. Once word got out about his limp dick and the pinching and everything, all the babes had avoided him like he was a fag or something. It was all that bitch’s fault. Him having an ugly wife and everything else. Every little bit of it.
Todd Gould woke up feeling just fine. He ate a big breakfast and went to work at his father’s furniture store. He thought about selling furniture.
For a few hours, Amy thought about doors, and how much trouble they could be. She decided that locksmithing would have made for a rewarding career path, and she wondered why her high school counselor had never suggested such an option. Add one more to the list of male-dominated professions requiring attention.
Finally, she couldn’t stand to look at the door anymore. The scored grain spoke of the wood’s age, and she began to think that she might be trapped in Steve Austin’s basement for a very long time, indeed.
So she stared at April’s corpse instead. The oddest scenario formed in her head, and she knew it was a result of reading too many Barbara Michaels novels. She imagined herself as an archaeologist trapped beneath a pyramid by a sudden cave-in, pushing forward in the face of danger, undaunted, discovering the burial vault of a forgotten Egyptian princess.
And then everything came together for her imagined alter ego in a sudden epiphany, the kind that only occurred in fiction. The beauty of the dead princess, captured for the ages on the carved wooden sarcophagus-a quiet beauty that was a twin to her own. This impression crossing with her memory of the strange, silent attentions of her Egyptian lover, his cold interest in her work, his fascination with the forgotten mysteries that only he recognized in a pair of beautiful eyes that gleamed like the Nile at sunset…
A dozen film-clips flickered in Amy’s memory Little bits of old mummy movies. Kharis the mummy-he of the gamey leg, severed tongue, and digit-less right paw-dragging his reincarnated love into a quicksand bog. And she could almost see herself, the beautiful archaeologist, lifting the sarcophagus lid that wore her own face, confronting the decayed corpse.
Knowing that in a thousand years she would be its twin.
Just as she would soon be April Destino’s twin in death.
Amy shook the image away, fighting to control her imagination. The task was impossible. She saw Steve Austin hauling April Destino out of the grave.
And she was left with one irrefutable impression-Austin, charged with the same unquenchable desire that had spanned the centuries in a dozen-plus works of fiction, was much more dangerous than a walking band-aid with a compulsive attitude.
Bat Bautista didn’t waste his time thinking about dead Egyptians.
He didn’t think much about April Destino, either.
He spent his day at a dusty state prison thirty miles north of town, just praying that some idiot con would give him some lip. He wanted nothing more than to bash some face while imagining that he was beating on Griz Cody, or Derwin MacAskill, or Todd Gould, or that smarmy asshole Shutterbug.
Those guys were so damn stupid. You could rattle their cages without even trying. Bat had to smile at the memory-Shutterbug screeching like goddamn Stepin Fetchit while Todd and Derwin and Griz tried to figure out who stole April Destino’s corpse.
Like you had to be a detective to figure it out.
Bat figured that he should have been a detective. He was the smartest guy he knew. If he had managed to pass the damn police tests, if he’d done better in the interviews…hell, he’d be chief of police by now if he’d only had a little luck.
Shit. The cops wouldn’t have him. Him-the guy who could solve the whole damn mystery.
Clue number one: a hole in the ground where April’s body should be. Clue number two: busted beer bottles beneath the granite cross that bore her name. There was only one guy in the world who had the hots for April Destino and played graveyard baseball. Just add clue number one to clue number two, end of story. Ozzy Austin balances the equation.
Good old Ozzy Austin. The Six Million Dollar Robot. Many moons had passed since Bat last crossed swords with that weird asshole. They had played baseball together as kids-little league. Pony, high school-but even then he had thought Austin was screwy. Norman Bates on the mound. Hecklers always got to Austin. They knew how to push his buttons. Calling him a robot was one way to do it-the guy was a robot, throwing that same damn fastball over and over. Austin was just lucky that most guys couldn’t hit it, but that didn’t change the fact that he pitched like some damn Iron Mike.
The truth fuckin’ hurt, and that was that. Hecklers never got to Bat Bautista. He just kept cool, maybe pictured himself bashing their heads with a claw hammer, and things were fine and dandy.
Bat twirled his nightstick, clattered it against the bars, imagined waving it in Austin’s face. He wondered if it was still easy to get under Ozzy Austin’s skin. He could almost see Austin squirming. He could almost smell his sweat. He whistled low and smooth as the idea took hold. He wondered how much money Ozzy Austin had, and how much peace and quiet he was going to let good old Ozzy buy with it.
Bat wondered about other stuff, too. He was one hell of a detective. He noticed things other people missed.
