Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

We drove back north on 114 and stopped at Jack’s on Child Street in Warren for clam chowder, littlenecks, and beverages. As one Killian’s led to another, and then to several more, the conversation turned to my possible future as a McCracken & Associates operative. By the time McCracken ponied up for the tab, the sun was setting, and a steady rain had begun to fall.

Phil Templeton lived in a raised ranch on Pace Court in Lincoln, just a few miles from the North Central State Airport. I parked the Bronco in a turnaround at the end of the cul-de-sac and took a moment to study the dark house. Then I fetched my flashlight from the glove box, and together McCracken and I splashed up the flagstone walk.

McCracken rang the bell, then spotted jimmy marks on the front door. He nudged it open with his shoe, and we stepped into the foyer.

“Mr. Templeton?” he called out. “Hello? Is anybody home?”

We crept down a short hallway, and I swept the flashlight beam over the living room. The coffee table had been knocked over. Shards from a broken carafe and a shattered wineglass or two sparkled against a red stain on the hardwood floor.

“Blood?” I asked.

McCracken dropped to one knee, slid a cheap ballpoint from his pocket, and scraped the end of it against the stain. Then he raised the pen to his nose and sniffed.

“Wine, I think.”

He rose and slid the Glock from his shoulder holster. I tugged the Kel-Tec from my waistband. Together, we prowled the house.

The other six rooms were dark and empty. Upstairs, we found Templeton’s home office, a computer humming on his keyhole desk. McCracken pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tapped a key. The screen came to life. He took several minutes to search the legislator’s e-mail but found nothing of interest.

We backed out without touching anything else, skipped down the stairs, and left the way we had come. I waited until we were half a mile down the road before I flicked on the headlights.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“Could be anything,” McCracken said. “A simple break-in. A fight. Maybe he just threw a tantrum when his latest pickup wouldn’t sleep with him.”

“Doesn’t feel like a housebreak,” I said. “The place wasn’t tossed.”

“And you say he hasn’t been answering his phone?”

“Yeah. For a couple of weeks.” My mind flashed on the still-unidentified floater. If it wasn’t Mario, then maybe-“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“I don’t suppose you have a burner phone,” McCracken said.

“In the glove box.”

“Smart,” he said. “It’s always good to have a cheap prepaid handy in case you need to make a call that can’t be traced back to you.”

He popped open the box, grabbed the phone, and called the Lincoln PD.

“I’d like to report a housebreak at number six Pace Court… No, the intruder is no longer present… No, you can’t have my name.”

With that, he clicked off.

I dropped McCracken off at home and drove back to Providence in the rain. By the time I parked in front of my place, it was nearly ten P.M. I tromped up the stairs, walked down the short second-floor hallway, and stopped dead in front of my apartment.

The door yawned wide open. I stole a quick glance and saw that the wood around the deadbolt was splintered.

I slipped the pistol from my waistband, raised it, and stood six inches to the left of the doorframe for a minute, maybe two. I heard nothing but the hum from the refrigerator.

Leading with the gun, I stepped inside and hit the switch for the overhead kitchen light. The refrigerator gaped open. The bottles of beer and jars of pickles and tomato sauce that had been inside were now a swamp of shards and goop on the linoleum floor. A heap of metal and plastic that used to be my microwave had been hurled into a corner. The kitchen chairs and table had been tipped over, shattering Tuukka’s aquarium.

I stepped into the bedroom and snapped on the light. The bureau drawers had been dumped, the chest tipped over on top of them. The mattress was ripped to shreds, a butcher knife from my kitchen tossed onto the stuffing.

In the sitting room, my battered sofa and stuffed chair had been given the same treatment. The TV lay in pieces between them. My books had been yanked from their shelves and thrown around the room. My turntable lay twisted and broken on the floor, and my treasured collection of vintage blues vinyl, which I’d been picking up at flea markets for years, had been stomped to pieces.

I tucked my pistol back in my waistband and returned to the kitchen. My first thought was of Tuukka. I’d grown fond of the little guy, and now he was on the loose. I rushed to close the apartment door, just in case he was still inside.

And there he was, hanging from the back of the door, his body still twitching. A steak knife from my kitchen drawer had been driven straight through his skull.

Tuukka was just a snake. A cold-blooded reptile. He didn’t bark or purr. He didn’t greet me with a thumping tail when I came home. He didn’t even want to be petted. But I liked him. After years of living alone, I’d taken comfort in his company. He hadn’t deserved to be stabbed through the head-but whoever murdered him did. I yanked the knife out and gently laid his body on the counter.

Suddenly I realized I was forgetting something. I sprinted back to the bedroom and threw open the footlocker. It was empty. My grandfather’s gun was gone.

Next morning, I curled Tuukka into a shoebox and buried him in the dirt in the narrow, grassless yard behind my building. A half hour later I was bent over my desk in the newsroom, sorting through the day’s press releases, when the security guard called from the lobby.

“Mulligan?”

“Yeah?”

“A couple of Providence police detectives just came in looking for you. I asked them to wait till I called up, but they brushed past me and got on the elevator.”

“It’s okay, Johnny. Thanks for the heads-up.”

The homicide twins, Wargart and Freitas, were stepping off the elevator now. They scanned the newsroom, spotted me, and swaggered to my cubicle.

“You need to come with us,” Wargart said.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not just yet.”

“Then you’re shit out of luck.”

“You’ve got some questions to answer, asshole,” Freitas said.

“Come with me,” I said.

I led the detectives to a small, vacant meeting room where we sat at a round butcher-block table with a computer on it.

“You reported a break-in at your apartment last night,” Freitas said.

“I did.”

“And you claimed that your forty-five was stolen,” she said.

“It was.”

“The same gun we asked you about the last time we paid you a visit,” Wargart said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How convenient,” he said.

“Not for me. You must have read the incident report, so you know my place was completely trashed. The bastard even killed Tuukka.”

“Who the hell is that?” Wargart said.

“My snake. You must remember Tuukka. The one without the feathers.”

“Nice cover story,” Freitas said.

“You think I did all that to myself?”

“Sure you did,” she said. “And then you lied to the responding officers and said you think Mario Zerilli did it. That would make him pretty lively for a corpse, don’tcha think?”

“Maybe he’s a zombie,” I said. “From what I see on TV, lots of dead people are turning into zombies nowadays. It’s a goddamned pandemic.”

Wargart reached across the table and grabbed the neck of my T-shirt with his left fist.

“What did you do with the forty-five, dickhead?”