Lawrence Block - Masters of Noir - Volume 1

I took a step closer to her. Carrera was no more than fifty feet away now. I could feel the sun on my shoulders and head, could hear the steady crunch of Carrera’s feet against the pebbles.

“Look at him, Linda,” I said, my voice a husky whisper. “Take a look at the fat slobbering pig you’re doing this for.”

“Don’t...” she said. She kept shaking her head and I could see her eyes beginning to glaze over.

“Take a look! Look at him, go ahead. There’s your boyfriend! There’s Carrera!”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said, anguish in her throat.

“Your boyfriend,” I repeated. “Carrera, fat...”

“My husband,” she said. “My husband, Jeff, my husband.”

He was almost on us. I could see his features plainly, could see the sweat dripping off his forehead. I took another step towards Linda.

“Leave him,” I whispered urgently. “Leave him, darling. Leave him, leave him.”

She hesitated for a moment, and I saw her lower lip tremble. “Jeff, I... I...”

She lowered the .45 for an instant, and that was when I sprang. I didn’t bother with preliminaries. I brought back my fist as I leaped and uncocked it as the .45 went off like a skyrocket. I smelled the acrid odor of cordite in my nostrils, and then I felt my fist slam against her jaw. She was screaming when it caught her, but she stopped instantly, crumpling against the ground like a dirty shirt.

Carrera was running now. I couldn’t see him as I stooped to pick up the .45, but a man his size couldn’t run on pebbles without all Mexico hearing it. I scrambled to my feet, lifting my head over the outcropping.

He fired the minute my head showed, his bullets chipping off rock that scattered like shrapnel, ripping into my face. I covered my eyes with one hand and began firing blindly.

Carrera stopped shooting as soon as I cut loose. I uncovered my face, then, and got him in my sights. He wasn’t hard to hit. Something that big never is. I fired two shots that sprouted into big red blossoms across the white cotton shirt he wore. He clutched at the blossoms as if he wanted to pick them for a bouquet, and then he changed his mind and fell flat on his face. The ground seemed to tremble a little — and then it was quiet.

I looked over my shoulder at Linda. She was still sprawled out on the ground, her hair spread out like spilled blackstrap under her head. I climbed over the rocks and walked to where Carrera was decorating the landscape. I rolled him over and unfastened the money belt. Carefully, slowly, I counted the money. It was all there, ten thousand bucks worth. Carrera’s eyes stared up at it, still greedy, but they weren’t seeing anything any more. I picked up his .45 and tucked it in my waistband. Overhead, like black thunderclouds, the vultures were already beginning their slow spiral. Carrera would be a feast, all right, a real fat feast.

I walked back to the rocks, my .45 cocked in my right hand.

She was just sitting up when I got there. Her knees were raised, and the skirt was pulled back over them, showing the cool whiteness of her thighs. She brushed a black lock of hair away from her face, looking up at me with wide brown eyes.

Her voice caught in her throat. “Carrera?” she asked.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“Oh.” The word died almost before it found voice. She stared at the ground for a moment, and then lifted her head again. “Then... then it’s all right... you and me... we...”

I shook my head slowly.

A puzzled look crept into her eyes. She looked at me with confusion all over her face, and the lip began trembling again.

“No, baby,” I said.

“But...”

“No,” I repeated.

“But, you said...”

I turned my back on her and started walking down the twisting path, anxious to cover the long distance to the Olds.

“Jeff!” she cried.

I kept walking. Over my shoulder, I said, “You’re Carrera’s woman, baby. Remember? Go back to him.”

I heard the sob that escaped her lips, but I didn’t look back. I kept walking, the sun still high, the sky a bright blue except where the vultures hung against it like hungry black dots.

If you’ve been around Los Angeles much, you know that desolate, unlighted strip of highway, Chavez Ravine Road, that stretches from Adobe Street to Elysian Park. It’s solitary and lonely enough in the daytime.

Wednesday night about eight P.M. I swung off Adobe Street, headed for Hollywood and home. Things had been slow for over a week at the office of Sheldon Scott, Investigations, so I’d closed up early and spent the afternoon jawing with the guys at City Hall, then stopped off on Adobe for a beer. I was about half a mile down Chavez Ravine Road when I saw the dog.

It was a big, mangy-looking mongrel sniffing a dirty white blob at the road’s edge. In my headlights the blob looked like something wrapped in newspaper, part of the paper darkly stained.

I kept on, angling toward Sunset, but that brown-stained paper stuck in my mind. It was a sort of creepy night to begin with; thick clouds were massed overhead blotting out the moon and stars, though it hadn’t yet started to rain. Thunder rumbled softly far away and the air was heavy, damp.

When I hit Sunset, the sight and sound of all the cars, instead of making me forget that thing I’d seen, brought it even more clearly into my mind. I turned around and drove back. The dog ran a few steps away and squatted close to the ground when I parked. Leaving the Cad’s headlights on I walked to the newspaper-wrapped bundle, looked at the mud smears on it — and at another brown stain. Then I gripped a corner of the paper and unwrapped it from the thing inside.

I didn’t know what it was at first. But two minutes later, using the phone in a nearby house, I was talking to my good friend, Phil Samson, Captain of Central Homicide. “Sam, this is Shell. Get somebody out here on Chavez Ravine Road. I think I’ve found a — a leg.”

“Oh, my Christ,” he said. “Another one.”

“Yeah.” This was number three. Three murders, parts of three dismembered bodies — three that we knew about. Sam was swearing. I told him where I was and hung up.

There were two others with me in room 42 at City Hall. Samson, a big pink-faced guy with a jaw like a boulder and a black unlighted cigar clamped in his strong teeth; and bald, brush-browed Louis from the Vice Squad. This was in Homicide’s lap, but the Vice Squad is interested in murders that show the work of a twisted mind.

We’d been kicking the case around and anyone eavesdropping would have thought there was a little respect for the dead here. They’d have been wrong. In any large police headquarters death becomes, finally, so common that it’s treated more casually, more flippantly, than by most people, and here in L.A. Homicide the boys had got to calling this particular killer The Butcher.

Louis, the Vice Squad Lieutenant, poured more coffee into my paper cup and I said to him, “Lou, you’re the psychologist. What the hell kind of guy would cut them up?”

He raised a shaggy eyebrow and patted his bald skull. “Two kinds. The practical guy, because it’s easier to get rid of an arm or leg than a body; and the nut. The nut likes it, gets a charge. This one’s a nut.”

“Why not practical?”

“Because the same guy did it. Three times is getting goddamned unpractical. At least it looks like the same guy, right, Sam?”

Samson bit into his black cigar. “So far. They’re still working on it.” He grabbed his phone and growled into it for a minute, then hung up. He looked at me. “Young girl again, about eighteen, five-two, hundred-ten pounds, blonde. Jesus.” He banged a big horny fist against his desk top and said, “All that they give me from a leg. Why in hell can’t they look in a test tube and come up with her name and who killed her?” He swore. “Same guy. This one had been frozen, too. Cut up while she was frozen stiff.”