Mullins ran a squab hand over his pasty face. Phil sympathized; Mullins was a down-home, laid-back town police chief—he didn’t know how to deal with situations like this, and since the office of police chief was an elected post in Crick City, that was a further worry. Mutilation, murder, drug assassinations came as alien to Chief Mullins as bottles of Seagrams at MADD meetings. Mullins was trying hard not to fall apart, and he wasn’t doing too keen a job of it. He didn’t want to look weak in front of his employees, which presented a side of the man—vulnerability— that Phil had never fathomed.
“I-I gotta wait for the M.E.,” Mullins wavered. Every time he glanced into the ravine, he looked like he might keel over. “You two get back to the station and start a rundown on this Rhodes character.”
“I’ll wait with you, Chief,” Phil offered. “Help you change that tire.”
“No, get on back, the both of you. I ain’t a baby, you know. I been at this business since you were wearing diapers.”
“Look, Chief, I’m not saying you’re a baby, for God’s sake. But you’re obviously a little shaken up.”
“I ain’t shaken up,” Mullins insisted. He steeled himself then, and stuffed a chaw of the Man into his cheek. “Take the evidence back to the station,” he ordered. “Run a rap check on Rhodes. And whatever either of you do, don’t tell anyone about this, not the county cops, not the state, not any-fucking-body. We’re not town clowns, you know. We’re a police department just as good as anyone else, and I don’t want some outside agency hogging our case. This is our problem, and we’re gonna be the ones who fix it.”
“Chief, look—”
“Get on back to the station with Susan,” Mullins commanded, more resolutely this time. “I’m your boss, so don’t give me no lip. You don’t like it, go work someplace else.”
“Got’cha, Chief,” Phil obeyed. “See you in awhile.”
He and Susan put the evidence bags in the trunk, and without further word, took the cruiser back down the Route. In the rearview, Mullins’ discomposed reflection shrank as they drove away: a fat, old, broken man.
“I’ve never seen him like that before,” Susan said from behind the wheel. “He was in pieces.”
“It’s hard for him to cope with—shit—getting out to change a flat and finding somebody skinned in his juris? He just doesn’t want to let on that he’s shook up. And he’s right about one thing. We can handle this ourselves. We don’t need the county cops wiping our noses.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?” Phil asked.
Susan’s pretty face looked in complete disarray as she steered the cruiser through the Route’s weaving bends. “This is serious business, Phil.”
“We’ll handle it.”
“I mean, Christ, you saw what they did to that guy. Who could possibly do something like that?”
“Psychopaths, that’s who. The only thing worse than a psychopath is a psychopath who’s a businessman. Drugs are just like any other business: you succeed by cutting out the competition. I guarantee, the people who did the job on that guy, it was all in a day’s work to them. They don’t give a shit.”
And then, without any warning at all, as his hair sifted in the breeze from the window and the first streams of sunlight peeked gloriously over the ridge, the most macabre question occurred to him.
What the hell did they do with the guy’s skin?
— | — | —
Thirteen
Both Phil and Susan got out of the station by noon. Mullins had returned earlier, after fixing his flat and signing the corpus of one Jake Dustin Rhodes off to the morgue; it hadn’t taken the M.E. very much time to officially pronounce Rhodes dead. It was hard to be much deader…
Phil’s estimation had been right on the mark; Susan’s rap check on Rhodes had revealed a profusion of arrests, convictions, suspended sentences (famous in this state), and even some time in the county slam—all for possession, distribution, and sales of PCP. He’d even been held as a suspect in a couple of drug-related murder investigations but had been released due to insufficient evidence. The world would not miss Jake Dustin Rhodes. After being a cop for a decade now, Phil was not surprised by the sense of detachment that overcame him shortly after seeing the state of the corpse; the sensibility went along with the job: when you see dead people, you don’t take it personally, and when you see dead drug-dealers, you care even less. Nor was Phil surprised by the strange and accelerated manner in which this narcotics investigation had bloomed. For weeks he’d been on the case and uncovered nothing to suggest a PCP operation in Crick City. Yet now, and literally overnight, he had Eagle Peters with a PCP history, a missing person named Orndorf with a PCP history, and a corpse named Rhodes with a PCP history. Another aspect of police work—sheer spontaneity—that he was well used to by now. Dumb luck was frequently a cop’s most reliable friend.
“Don’t forget our date tomorrow,” Susan reminded him when they both got out at Old Lady Crane’s boardinghouse.
Are you kidding me? He’d sooner forget his name. “I know, hell hath no fury like a dispatcher scorned.”
“See you at work tonight,” she said, skipping up the old carpeted stairs.
Phil smiled in spite of his fatigue, and walked down the first-floor hall to his own room. He felt a numb elation; he hadn’t been on a real “date” in some time. And what pleased him much more was the growing attraction he felt for Susan. It seemed easy and honest, not just his physical attraction to her—each day, though, she did seem even more beautiful, her eyes more blue, her hair more silken, her physique more alluring—but his personal attraction as well; he liked her in too many ways he could name, and she clearly liked him. I must be doing something right, he gave himself credit. Why would she want to go out with me if she didn’t think I was a cool guy?
Right now, though, he was a tired guy. Night shifts skewed his metabolism to begin with, and worse was the fact that, thanks to today’s unavoidable overtime, he was getting to bed hours later than he was used to. The simple prospect of sleep never seemed more luxurious as he closed and locked his door and began to undress.
He only had one wish.
No dreams today, okay, Mr Sandman? No nightmares.
The dreams were subtly haunting him now. It seemed that the instant he dozed off, his mind took him back to that byway of his childhood. Like a grainy, ill-exposed movie: his ten-year-old self wandering through the humid, vine-tangled woods. The little Creeker girl, pretty in spite of her deformities, running away into the blistering sun. The high hill surrounded by dying grass that was as tall as he was, and atop the hill—
The House.
Christ…
And its marred, narrow windows set into whitewashed wood. Windows like eyes glaring straight into the throbbing heart of the nightmare itself…
He hung up his gunbelt in the closet, unfastened his badge and pulled off his shirt. A moment ago he’d been in a great mood—now it was ruined. The nightmare festered even when he was awake; it sabotaged him. Why should he remain so obsessed with the memory? That had all been over two decades ago, if it had even been real at all. I should see a shrink, he considered. It wasn’t fully a joke. The nightmare was stressing him out now, making raids on his sleep, and pecking at his waking thoughts like some demented, needle-beaked grackle gorging on a pile of delectable worms. It was now to the point that, exhausted as he was, he felt afraid to go to bed. For he knew the specter would be waiting to feast on more of his memory, the grim, blade-sharp images of the things he thought he’d seen in the House that day…
Jesus Christ, can’t you quit thinking about that shit! he hollered at himself. What the hell is wrong with you, you basketcase!
And at the end of this self-explosive thought, the tiniest rap of knuckles sounded at the door. His mind felt so disarranged at that moment, he didn’t even at first contemplate who it might be. Susan, maybe. Maybe she forgot to tell him something. Or maybe it was his landlady, or Mullins. But when he answered the door he saw, in smothered shock, that it was none of these people.
“Hello, Phil,” came the subdued and slightly sultry voice. Slightly sultry, yes, but more than slightly familiar,
