The camp quieted. The barrel fire burned down to a stinking smolder. The firewatchers said their goodnights and were snug in their sleeping bags dreaming of playgrounds and Girl Scouts. The last TV winked off. I rose from my crouch to find a hot sheet joint where I could spend the daylight hours.
A figure stepped from the tents, followed by another. It was the man in the parka. I recognized the faux coyote trim around his hood. Must have had a prostate problem to risk another late-night piss run. He had a larger pal with him. This second guy was in a shiny Gore-Tex coat that made him look like a parade blimp. In addition to his height he carried a ball bat in his gloved hand. I stepped farther back into the shadows to watch.
They shuffled on to the john and the bigger man stood sentry outside, stamping his feet against the cold. I settled down to watch until they finished their business then I’d move on to find a room.
A shadow moved against a column behind the porta potty. A shape, moving low, came around into the street and swooped toward the big man in Gore-Tex. The man saw the movement in time to turn and swing the bat two-handed. The shape ducked inside the arc of the bat and had the man down on the snow with an astonishing speed. Something about the movement, ghost-like and feral.
This time it was Roxanne.
She whipped her razor over the fallen man’s throat in one fluid motion. A steaming jet of crimson stained a snow drift. She used the collar of his coat for a grip and burrowed her face into his neck, her shoulders heaving with the effort of draining him of every drop.
The man in the parka exploded from the john, his pants still around his ankles. Roxanne sprang up from the Gore-Tex guy as if on wires. The parka stumbled back slipping on the ice or tripped up by his own pants. Roxanne closed the distance between them in a heartbeat. She took his face in her splayed hand and drove it hard against the icy curb. The man in the parka moved no more.
I was a half-step from the edge of the shadows when Roxanne looked up. Her eyes shone yellow but she wasn’t looking at me.
A cop car was crunching along the road, its headlights trapping Roxanne and her two fresh victims like actors on a stage.
• 21 •
I waited, watching, for Roxanne to take off. I was ready to follow whichever way she ran. Instead, she stood waiting for the cop car to pull level with her. The driver door opened and a big cop stepped out onto the salted road.
It was the redheaded cop. The guy with the gym muscle. The one who was there when I crashed the car. He stooped to cuff the man in the parka while Roxanne opened the rear door of the cop car to toss in Gore-Tex like a sack of groceries. The cop hefted the smaller man and stuffed him into the rear.
A group of pervs left their tents to stand along the curb watching. The cop waved them away before getting behind the wheel. Roxanne slid in on the passenger side and then they were away. Everyone went back to their tents.
I made a mental note of the cop car’s number. Two-Two-Five. It was a county sheriff’s car not a city car. It was black and tan and marked with a star on the door. I’d know it again if I saw it.
I gave it a few minutes and moved closer to the porta potty. The salty slush was disturbed by the brief struggle. A pink stain spread across the snow where Roxanne’s razor slash had sent the gout of hot blood. I crouched and took a bit of the blood infused snow and popped it in my mouth. It was diluted but still tasted of copper and grease.
There was a thicker puddle at the curb where the man in the parka struck his head. It was congealing in the snow melt, tangy with rock salt. I dipped my fingers in it and sucked the juice from them.
I walked a few blocks north to where the registered sex offenders from the camp parked their cars. They lined them up along either side of a street running between the interstate fence and the rear of a big brick building. A derelict factory or warehouse. The street was unplowed. The cars were covered in snow.
A shiny red Hyundai mounded over with snow was parked with two wheels up on the curb. I pressed the lock key on the remote I took off the mugger. The headlights of the Hyundai blinked yellow. The car chirruped.
The interior was clean. Nothing on the seats or dash. The kid had no respect for the lives of others but was a neat freak about his ride.
I cranked the key and the engine coughed to life followed by a deafening rumble from behind me. I found the controls for the stereo and turned the music off. The throbbing woofers in the trunk went silent.
I had time to think over what happened on the drive to the golden mile down at the next highway exit.
That cop had chased after Roxanne on the night of the crash. She let him follow her until she could spring an ambush far enough from the road. I didn’t know if she turned him or had him under some kind of spell. I didn’t even know if that was a thing, that hypnotic deal I saw in movies. She sure didn’t use it the night we met. Free-flowing booze and a generous view of her tits were enough to lead to my downfall.
So she had a new partner. One that could provide protective cover. The perfect mate for hunting. I wasn’t sure if that would make it harder or easier to find her.
I couldn’t help but feel jealous. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, Roxanne and I. I’m not even sure how you’d define our relationship. We weren’t friends. I think she saw me as a curiosity, an amusement. I saw her as a guide to this new world she’d brought me, unwillingly, into. I still needed her for that. The lessons were not over. I needed someone to show me how this was supposed to work; how I was supposed to survive.
The first motel I came to was just the kind of place I was looking for. The Tartan Motor Lodge. A grinning cartoon Scotsman winked at me from the road sign. An L-shaped structure with two dozen rooms on two levels. It shared a lot with an all-night liquor store and a Denny’s. A few cars were pulled up to rooms. Most backed into spots on the freshly plowed lot. Cheaters.
The office was muggy from a space heater humming in a corner. There was a white guy in a wrinkled raincoat registering at the desk when I entered the office. His “date”, a heavily made up black woman stood outside in the cold smoking a Kool and hugging a faux rabbit jacket around her shoulders. Romeo counted out bills and shoved them through the slot in the screen to a weedy looking guy behind a counter.
“You need anything sent over? Drinks? Beer maybe?” the counter guy said.
“We’re fine,” the raincoat said. He smelled like he’d had enough already. He snapped up the room key from the slot and shouldered past me into the cold.
“How much for two nights?” I said.
“There’s a Radisson up the road,” the counter guy said after scanning what passed for a lobby to see that I was alone.
“This place is fine.”
“Sure. One fifty if you’re using a card. One twenty cash.”
“And I won’t need housekeeping. I just want to sleep.”
He took a second look at me. Sized me up for a junkie, which was okay with me.
“Sure. Sure. Hang a sign on the knob.”
“Can you pass the word to the maids just to make sure? I’m a sound sleeper.”
“Sure. Sure.”
I counted out bills, got the key and went up to B-9.
It was about what I expected. A sagging queen bed. Scuffed nightstand and dresser. A cheap TV mounted to the wall. The picture window covered in gold polyester drapes. I shot the bolt home and placed the chain in the loop. To make sure I pushed the dresser against the door. I pulled the mattress off the bed frame and onto the floor. Then dragged the box spring to prop it against the window to block out the light coming off the parking lot. I used sheets and a blanket to jam around the box spring to cut off every chink of illumination. The room was pitch black. I lay down atop the mattress and snapped on the TV.
I surfed around the channels, sipping a few vials of blood while waiting for dawn and the deep sleep that came with it. Twice around the horn brought me back to a local news channel and a story of the police dealing with a baffling mystery of a murder and a
missing corpse. I was about to switch back to a poker tournament when a familiar face came on the screen.
Me.
It was my official picture from Handley-Barker. Me wearing my company blazer and friendliest grin. The murder victim was a county medical examiner. Turned out that I was the missing corpse.
My mind was getting fuzzy. Somewhere out beyond my barricaded window and door the sun was coming up. I had to listen hard to the TV to make sense of it; to relate it to what I experienced. The police were on the lookout for the person or persons unknown who killed a county employee while in the commission of snatching of my body. Not a lot of details other than no surveillance video existed of the perpetrators. Of course not. I was the perpetrator. The missing corpse walked out on its own past all their cameras.
The report ended with them saying that the police were looking into my background for any connections that might shed light on what happened.
Good luck with that.
I snapped off the TV and lay back on the mattress and covered up head to toe with a bed cover.
As I fell into drowsiness I made plans for the next night. I ran through my options for finding Roxanne again and came up with nothing. I had to find her. I wasn’t going to make it like this. Living day to day. Or night to night. Then my thoughts drifted back to the clerk in the motel office. How he looked at me. I was a junkie to his eyes. And that’s what I was now.
Just another addict.
• 22 •
A Malaysian plane vanished somewhere over the Pacific and wiped every other story off the news cycle. Even the local news channel wasn’t covering the mystery of the missing corpse any longer. Part of that could have been that there were no new developments. Certainly no video.
I sat on the edge of the reassembled bed with the remote in my hand, sipping a breakfast dose from one of my last dozen vials. It was thick and a little funky. I should have found a way to keep it better chilled. Lesson learned.
The news the night before presented more questions than it answered. No mention of a missing policeman or police car. The redheaded cop was Roxanne’s new playmate. That meant he was turned. That he wasn’t listed as missing meant that he was still reporting for work. That made no sense though. How was he able to leave his patrol area to come into the city to hunt with Roxanne? Someone should have noticed that. But what did I know? Maybe county deputies were free roaming agents.
I left the room as I found it and walked across the dark lot to where I left the Hyundai. A cold rain was turning the snow to slush. I pulled out past the Denny’s to point the car toward the surface road that ran along the interstate. I stopped and gassed up, paying from the roll of cash I took off the kid.
Roxanne and her cop buddy would be hungry again. I know I was. The RSO camp was easy pickings. Irresistible. I figured to cruise the camp and surrounding streets to look for the cop car. I drove around in an ever widening grid. There were homeless occupying alleys in makeshift sheds of corrugated metal sheets and cardboard. Some sat sharing bottles on stoops of boarded up row houses. This was a hunting ground of the forgotten.
I found the cop’s car after a few hours of drifting along the dark streets. Car 225 was pulled up along a fence that ran around a schoolyard. Lights out and engine cold. Footprints in the slush led from the car to the high fence. They continued across the undisturbed snow that blanketed the school yard. Waffle stomper prints from the soles of a large man’s shoe. The smaller triangular imprint of cowboy boots. Roxanne’s boots.
I pulled the Hyundai around the corner and left it in the shadows between two U-Hauls on the lot of a rental place. I walked back to the fence and scaled the ten feet of links to drop onto the other side. I was careful to skirt the edges of the fence, not disturbing the virgin snow around the twin set of footprints.
The school building was an ancient pile of bricks with a row of prefab schoolrooms set to one side of the lot. A rhythmic ping-ping-ping sound came from behind the prefabs. I moved low between them toward the source of the sound. The pinging stopped. It was followed by something striking a surface then the pinging resumed.
Under the light of a pole lamp was an outdoor basketball court surrounded by the walls of the old school building. Roxanne crouched at center court over a body lying prone. A second body lay still near the foul line. The cop was at the far net, dribbling the ball and taking practice shots at the hoop while Roxanne fed.
I watched from the shadows between two prefabs. Roxanne sat back on her heels, her mouth a crimson smear. I backed farther into the shadows to make my way back across the schoolyard and over the fence the way I came.
From where I left the Hyundai I could see the cop car parked by the fence. Roxanne and the cop came into view around the school building. The cop had one body over each shoulder. Roxanne was up and over the fence like a cat. She stood waiting while, one after the other, the cop held each body over his head and lobbed them over the top of the fence. They landed in the snow, spent and broken things. Roxanne opened the trunk and the cop joined her to stuff the bodies inside. A pair of kids in colorful jackets and bright white sneakers. They’d never go home again. Gangs would get the blame probably.
Back in the car, they pulled from the curb and made a left. I gave them some time and followed, lights out. The streets were empty making the cop car easy to follow even at the two block distance I kept between us. I pulled to a stop when the cop made a right onto a road that turned to cross a steel bridge over the river. The lights of the cop car came to a stop mid span. After a moment or two a pair of dark shapes dropped from the bridge. They dropped into the slowly moving water with a pair of silent splashes. The cop car was on the move again and I followed at a discreet distance.
It was easier to keep up once the cop left the empty streets and turned into denser traffic along one of the avenues. I was able to pull up closer, keeping cars between us all the time. We drove west for a while past brightly lit strips of storefronts between blocks of dark apartment rows. I followed through several turns, falling back as traffic thinned when city turned into county. They pulled into a driveway between rows of naked trees to enter a broad parking area of fifty acres or more surrounding a row of apartment towers. I followed them onto the lot and took a spot along the tree line.
The cop drove into an angled space under a sputtering street pole lamp. Together he and Roxanne walked over the lot to the nearest building and disappeared inside.
I drove around the building a few times, looking up at the windows. It was after one in the morning but still most apartments showed some lamplight from inside. All but the sixth floor, north east corner. The windows there were pitch black.
I knew where to find them now. I drove back to the Tartan to drain the last of my vials and lie dormant until night fell again.
• 23 •
The world shrank down to my need to feed.
I woke up ravenous. There’s no other way to describe it. Obsessed.
The night before, while following the cop and Roxanne, I passed plenty of corners where obvious drug sales were being made. Young men standing idle before shuttered stores. Cars pulled up to the curb, stopping a few seconds before pulling away.
I traced my way back and found a market open for business. Three kids in hoodies and layers of winter clothing waiting to service cars driven in from the suburbs. Nice cars. Recent SUVs and sedans dusted white with salt melt. There was walk-up trade, too. They didn’t interest me.
A dark blue Yukon drew my attention. Fat tires, tinted windows. It came to a stop in front of the corner store still open. One of the kids stepped from the flickering neon of the beer signs in the window to lean in the passenger window. The driver reached over the seats holding out bills. The kid counted them and jerked his head, gesturing around the corner. The Yukon pulled into the darker cross street where another kid ran out to him and passed something to the driver.
I followed the Yukon as it made turns to head back to a boulevard lined with strip malls either side
. The driver parked in the dark behind an IHOP, engine idling. I pulled up a few spaces away and cut my lights. I stepped out and came around the back of the Yukon. It had those stick figures on the back window. A wife. A husband. Three kids and a dog. There was a COEXIST bumper sticker on the tailgate.
The dark window was rolled up and fogged with condensation inside. I tapped on the glass. A muffled voice from inside.
“I need you to roll down your window.” I tried to sound as authoritative as I could. I was afraid the driver would hear the longing in my voice.
A thin guy with horn-rimmed glasses peeped at me over the gap made when the glass rolled down halfway. I could see he had a sweater rolled up to bare his right arm. No other sign of the dope he just bought. He’d have whisked that out of sight in his panic when I knocked on the window.
“All the way please, sir.” I used that tone of forced politeness I’d heard cops use on me whenever I got pulled over.
He stabbed a button on the door and the window whirred open. His eyes were on me the whole time. I could see fear there. Hunger too. Like mine.
The driver began to say something. I cut him off with a hand over his mouth and nose. I plunged the tip of the carpet knife into the side of his throat and pulled it across his Adam’s apple with a single tug. His hands leapt to his throat and I batted them away to clap my mouth over the wound.
I smelled his rancid sweat through the wool of his sweater. I heard his pulse slowing in my ears even as the font of blood in my mouth slowed. I grabbed his wrist to keep his hand off the car horn. His struggles grew feeble then stopped all together. His skin looked like paper, pale and thin. A tear froze on his cheek.
He was dead. He was empty.
I lifted my head from the white lips of the wound and caught a glimpse of color in the back seat.