A touch of evil, p.27
A Touch of Evil, page 27
That’s when I tossed the gun at his head.
61.
Call it dumb luck. But Carl was able to evade the gun by shifting his head at the very last millisecond. At the same time, he took two quick steps forward and triggered his automatic. The bullet grazed my left shoulder. I lunged at him, so that he reared back hard against the wall. Grabbing hold of his jacket, I held on while he pushed off the wall, propelling us both across the gunroom floor until we crashed into the case, the remainder of the still intact glass shattering. His gun fell out of his hand, hit the wood floor, slid, and came to stop by the open door.
He made a tight fist, punched my face, dropping me to my knees. He grabbed my left ear lobe, yanked on it so that I had no choice but to face upwards at him. He punched me again and again in the forehead, nose and mouth. Short sharp punches with a tight, hard fist that had the same effect as rapid-fire hammer blows. I felt my nose crack and my lower lip burst open, my head grow dizzy from a brain that was banging against the rigid sides of my skull. I knew I’d pass out if I didn’t get free of his grip. Do it now.
My clear vision was fading. But out the corner of my eye, I saw the gun on the floor. Rallying my strength, I raised up my right hand, set it on his bloody face, and scratched at his eyes, trying like hell to gouge the eyeballs out with my fingertips. He screamed and released me, bringing both his hands to his face. I lunged for Carl’s pistol, managing to grab hold of it with my outstretched right hand. But that’s when I felt something sharp impaled into my bad foot.
The force of the act didn’t register at first.
The pain that shot through my veins and nerves was so intense, so electric, so beyond anything I’d ever experienced, that all other sensory perception seemed to shut down entirely, like an overburdened power grid.
I dropped the pistol because I couldn’t bear its weight in my now weakened state. Looking down at my feet, I could see that Carl had jammed a six-inch piece of glass into the top of my sutured foot. The knife-like glass had penetrated the Velcro strap on my walking boot, along with my skin and flesh. After a brief beat, I was able to retain enough clarity to work up a thunderous scream while I kicked at his face with the boot heel on my good foot. His head reared back and he seemed on the verge of passing out while the back of his skull collided with his upper spine.
Sitting up, I did what I knew I had to do. I grabbed hold of the glass and yanked it out of my foot, then brought the blood-smeared triangular point down fast into Carl’s thigh.
He yelped like an injured dog, while once more I went for the gun. He turned himself around onto all fours, came at me with his mouth baring bloodied teeth. Aiming the barrel for that mouth, I pressed the trigger. There was an explosion and his head popped like a blood-filled water balloon slapped against a brick wall, his torso dropping dead weight onto my legs.
The gun was still gripped in my hand as it rested in my lap. I knew I should have been looking for Susan. What if she were still alive? Locked away somewhere in the house? In the basement maybe. But that was just false hope.
I knew she was dead.
They had been telling me she was dead all along, and that I was the one who killed her. I just had no recollection of the event. And if I had killed her, I had no reason in the world to live any longer. Carl’s piece was gripped in my hand and it was my turn to eat it. Opening my mouth, I raised the gun up, turned it upside down, and pressed the barrel against the roof of my mouth. Closing my eyes, I slipped my slipped my thumb into the trigger guard, just like John Cattivo taught me.
I was just about to depress the trigger when I heard the clatter of footsteps outside the gunroom door.
62.
Lana screamed.
I pulled the gun out of my mouth, once more rested it in my lap.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” she said, more angry than afraid. “You were supposed to die. We couldn’t take the chance on you testifying. That’s what Carl told us. You had to be disposed of for good.”
From down on the floor, I readjusted the gun in my hand, wrapped my hand around the grip, pointed the barrel at Lana.
“Where’s Susan?”
“You know where Susan is.”
“No I don’t. Now where is she?”
“Far away from here. Let that be your first clue. You only have to go so far as your secret garden if you want a second clue. But then, you know all this don’t you? You’re the one who did it.”
My body felt like it was burning up. Drowning in fever.
“How can she be far away?” I insisted, pressing my thumb on the hammer, cocking it back into firing position. “I thought you two were in love? What does her disappearance have to do with my pot patch?”
“Figure it out for yourself, Ethan.”
“Maybe I should just shoot you now and be finished with you forever.”
“You’re not gonna shoot me,” Lana said, working up the kind of smile she would assume when handing out cookies to the neighborhood children. “You’re much too in love with me for that. Every man and woman I’ve been with since I was twelve years old has been hopelessly in love with me and they have all paid the ultimate price. You’re a slave and once a slave, always a slave, Ethan. Now put the gun down and we can talk this through and then get the hell out of town. We still have a shot at being together. What do you say? Let’s just pack our bags and make our way south to Mexico. We go now, no one will ever catch us.”
I looked into her blue eyes.
“I lust you,” I said.
“Excuse me?” she said. “What’s that mean?”
“I lust you... I hate you.”
I waited until her smile faded entirely from her sweet face before I pulled the trigger.
63.
She dropped like a stone. Lana landed hard onto her chest and face. She began to convulse and tremble like there was something trying to escape her dead body besides her soul.
Maybe it was the devil who was trying to escape, if you believe in that kind of thing. Or maybe it was just her badness. Her evil core. Whatever it was, I could only look at her until her muscles stopped moving and she exhaled a final poisoned breath.
64.
I ran.
Didn’t matter that my foot was bleeding out or throbbing with blasts of sharp pain. At this point, I felt like gangrene had settled in for good, infecting my blood, infecting my mind. I didn’t care. I just needed to get to that pot patch. Susan wasn’t anywhere to be found. Lana said that I had done something bad to her and that my first clue was the pot patch. Carl also said I’d done something horrible and that I had to pay for it. The convenience store clerk said that I killed them all. But I had no recollection of doing anything bad.
No memory whatsoever.
I shoved Carl’s automatic, barrel first, into my pant waist, and exited the house onto the back deck. From there I made my way through the fence gate. My heart raced, my foot pulsated in bursts of agony and blood. My entire body was on fire. As I made my way in the darkness down the narrow alley created by the parallel fence exteriors, I began to make out the sound of sirens. Without a shred of doubt in my mind, I knew it had to be Miller and his men coming after me. He’d already called me once before and I hadn’t answered. He must have known that eventually, Carl would pick me up and arrest me. But it didn’t go down exactly as planned. Carl wanted to pick me up all right, but didn’t want me arrested. He only wanted me dead so he and Lana could live together forever.
What it all meant was that I had only a minute or two to check on the patch, to prove to myself that Lana was lying... that I had nothing to do with Susan’s disappearance. Once I did that, I would get the hell out of Orchard Grove. When I was a safe enough distance, I would send Miller the sound recording I’d made of Lana and Carl as they tried to kill me. It wouldn’t prove that I had nothing to do with John’s fake suicide, but it would shift most of the guilt to Lana. We’d all share in the guilt even if most of us were dead, or fast on our way to getting there.
I came around the fence to the small patch of woods, and in the moonlight I made out the spot where the coffee can had been extracted from the earth. I also made out something else. Another area beside it that had recently, as in mere hours ago, been disturbed so that the ground was no longer covered in dead leaves and varieties of vegetation. The area I speak of could not have been more than a couple of feet by a couple of feet, and it rose up out of the ground like a miniature burial mound.
All life seemed to drain out of my body then. What replaced it was inevitability. The ice cold realization that perhaps Lana and Carl had been telling the truth after all, and that my memory had indeed failed me, either because of the whiskey or simply a form of selective memory that can only be achieved after an event so violent and disturbing, the conscious brain can’t possibly process it.
I no longer felt the pain in my foot, no longer cared it if was leaking an oil slick of blood. I only needed to know what exactly had been buried inside that mound. Hobbling through the brush and onto the patch, I dropped to my knees like a penitent man. I brushed away the dirt and dug with my hands until I felt a cold, round, semi soft object. Like a pumpkin covered in a sticky liquid. When I brought my fingers to my face, I smelled the unmistakable iron-like aroma of blood.
I put my hands back on the pumpkin and felt something soft, lush, and gentle.
Hair.
Tears began to fill my eyes, the pressure building behind my eyeballs as I dug around the hair, until I uncovered a small portion of face and a single eye. I dug in my pocket for my car keys and the small LED laser light attached to the keychain, and I shined the light on the face and saw that the hair was dark. Brunette. I shot onto my backside, because I knew now what I was looking at without having to see it in its entirety.
“Oh my sweet Jesus,” I said, the first of the tears streaming down my face. “Sweet Jesus in heaven.”
I shifted onto my knees and brushed more of the dirt away and I could see that the head had been severed at the neck. Shifting myself, I vomited onto the loose dirt and fell back onto my side. I recalled the previous night when I’d gone to Lana’s home armed with a sharp French knife. I saw myself standing outside on the Cattivo back deck, the knife gripped in my hand while I listened to the sounds of Lana and Susan making love in the bedroom at the other end of the ranch home. In my head I saw myself going to the sliding glass doors, saw my hand taking hold of the opener, saw myself sliding the door open...
But that’s all I recall.
All I recall, that is, until I woke up in my bed, my hands covered in blood from the small cuts on my palms and fingers. Or so I could only assume. Had I actually made my way into the Cattivo house, crossed over the dining room and the kitchen, and entered into the master bedroom and killed Susan after catching her making love to Lana? My Lana? Our Lana? Had I been filled with a jealous rage not only at seeing the two of them together in bed, but knowing they’d been plotting against me all along to take the fall for John’s murder? Were there two sides to my personality? The movie maker artist and the cold maniacal killer? I was all too familiar with the artist, but I’d never been introduced formally to the maniac until now. Until last night.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” I repeated as I pulled myself up onto my knees, then up onto my feet. “I killed Susan. I... killed... Susan.”
...Or did I? I’d been drinking Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels makes me crazy, violent. It makes me black out...
As the tears fell, dripping off my chin and onto the raw earth, I did my best to cover up the shallow grave with dirt and dead leaves. Then, returning to my feet, awkwardly and out of balance, I began to make my way back through the brush, and around the fence perimeter to the Cattivo driveway.
65.
Carl’s truck was still parked in the driveway where he left it earlier, the keys still inserted in the column-mounted ignition. Opening the door, I shoved myself inside, turned the key, fired the engine up. For a beat or two, I stared out the windshield onto my new neighbor’s home-sweet-home, until I shifted my gaze onto my own home only a few feet away. They were the kind of neighborhood homes that would be a dream for a young couple just starting their new life together. I was there once myself. Me and Susan.
Unzipping the blood and mud stained overalls, I reached into my pocket, pulled out the mobile phone. I saw that it still had power even if the battery life indicator was now in the red. Once I got to my studio in the city, I’d charge it back up. But for now, I also saw that the voice recorder app was still operating. Thumbing Stop, I then hit play just to make certain I’d succeeded at recording everything that went down inside the Cattivo house of horrors since I’d arrived there less than a half hour ago.
“Well good morning, Carl. How long have I been asleep?”
“Get out. In the house.”
I hit stop, then went to texts. There was a new text from Miller and also several unanswered calls from him.
“Where are you, Ethan?” the text said. “You can’t run. Let me come for you.”
“Carl is dead,” I texted in response. “So are Lana and Susan. They are all dead.”
I hit Send and waited for a reply. It came within seconds.
“I must bring you in. You know that. Stay where you are.”
“Not yet.”
I thumbed Send once more, then turned the phone off, shoving it back into my pocket. Looking down at my foot, I could see the small puddle of blood pooling on the floor under the gas pedal. Setting my left foot on the brake, I shifted the truck into reverse. Backing out of the driveway, I could feel the sharp throb shooting in and out of my foot, and I could smell the rotting flesh, and feel the fever burning in my head. I had no choice but to suck it all up while I made one last drive through Orchard Grove back to my studio in the city. It would be one hell of a rough drive, but a drive I had no choice but to make.
I was all alone now.
The last slave of Lana Cattivo left alive.
The Present
I’m dying.
Serves me right I suppose. For now I sit at an old wood desk that’s positioned only a foot or two from the front door to my downtown writing studio. I see my pale, scruffy face framed inside the mirror that hangs on the wall by a sixpenny nail. My smartphone in hand, I have it hooked up to the charger I store here and which is plugged into the wall.
“That’s all there is to say, Miller,” I say, speaking into my smartphone voice recording app. “There’s nothing left to tell. Only questions remain, the major one being, what happened to Susan’s body?
“But then, I can only assume you’re probably at the Cattivo house as I speak. That you’ve seen the bodies of Lana and Carl Pressman lying on the gunroom floor. Have you located the rest of Susan’s remains? Have you located her head in the pot patch out back? Did you find the knife that killed her? Was it a French knife?
“I still have no recollection of doing something so brutal and unspeakable to her. How is it possible I could take a knife to her like that? Sure, I woke up with blood on my hands, but there was no garden dirt on me that I remember. Is it possible that I didn’t kill her? Is it possible that I dropped the knife onto the deck outside the sliding glass door, like I remember? That Lana heard the back sliding door open and close, and when she came outside to inspect, she saw the knife and was overcome with a sick idea? Maybe, in the end, she decided the only way you and the rest of the APD would truly believe I carefully planned her husband’s murder was by my leaving behind yet another body. The body of my wife. It would be a crime of passion. A murder committed by a man who was out of his mind with rage. By killing her in the most inhuman of ways, you wouldn’t find it very hard to believe that I was also capable of taking out Detective Cattivo.
“Even the placement of the head would not have been an indiscriminate move. John knew all about my pot patch and he’d threatened on more than one occasion to use it against me. He knew I was selling weed in order to make ends meet. I was about to lose my house after all. He was aware that financially, Susan and I weren’t making it. That in mind, Lana could have easily drugged Susan by slipping something into her drink, then cut off her head, burying it in the pot patch, all the time knowing full well that you would have no choice but to accuse me of the obscene crime. Add in the killing of the convenience store clerk and the run-in with the troopers down the road from that motel, and you’ve painted a picture of a crazed killer on the loose. A man who, in another life, achieved a degree of fame in Hollywood, but who’d fallen on times so hard, his brain snapped.
“I guess I can’t be entirely sure how it all went down, but that seems as good a theory as any. Anyway, where I’m going, I guess God will be the judge. Or the Devil. But promise me something, Miller. That when I’m finally gone and you recover the rest of Susan’s body, you will also make an attempt at searching for evidence that will exonerate me of her death. I can’t be sure of what you will find, if anything, but it might just be enough to let my soul off the hook. After all, eternity is a long time to fry.
“Sirens. I hear sirens, Miller. Is that you coming after me down here in the city? Are the sirens I’m hearing outside my door meant for me? Let me look. I don’t even need to get up out of the chair to crack the front door open a few inches.
“Okay, I see you now. I see you standing outside my building, protected by the opened door to your unmarked cruiser. I also see six or seven blue-and-whites parked diagonally in the middle of the road, their rooftop flashers igniting the black sky. I see cops armed to the teeth. It’s a perfect ending, set up exactly the way I’d script it.
“Wait, what was that? The call for me to come out with my hands in the air. You want me to exit the door, climb the three steps to the sidewalk, and surrender myself to the law. Then you’ll insist that I drop to my knees and lie down flat on my chest, face down on the hot summer-heated macadam, hands outstretched over my head.
