Tom Schreck - TKO

Clearly, Kell wasn’t in the best of moods and I didn’t feel like getting scolded, so I shut up for a while. I went back to drinking my beer and AJ flipped the TV to Channel 13 for the news. The local stations were milking the hell out of the murder story with nightly updates even when they had very little new information.

“New developments in the Crawford Slayer case,” the pretty rubberized female anchor said, starting the news. “Toxicology reports indicate that victims Connie Carter and Alison Mann both had traces of illicit drugs in their system. The State Laboratory did not recognize any of the drug’s metabolites and they did not fit any of the usual drug categories.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“It usually means that the subjects were using a designer drug like ecstasy, except it’s a new version or some sort of derivative,” Kelley said.

“Hmmm…”

“What ‘Hmmm’?”

“Well, what do you think that does to the case?”

“The fact that a high-school kid was getting high? I don’t think it does anything. High-school kids being high, when did that become news?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

I decided that I had gotten my recommended daily dose of Schlitz and started to head out. On my way to the door, I couldn’t help but hear the Foursome looking for some sort of resolution to Cal Ripken’s problems with Kevin Costner.

“That’s why he played in all those games,” Rocco said.

“Because his wife was doing the guy from The Untouchables?” TC said.

“Apparently, he wasn’t untouchable in real life,” Jerry Number Two said.

Al, the long-eared alarm clock, went off at just after five on Sunday morning. In between the steady stream of WOOFs there was the familiar thwack sound.

“Good morning, Billy,” I said as I stood on my front stoop. It dawned on me that it had been a couple of days since I put the kid through his paces, which probably accounted for his early morning visit. He was throwing his stars into my tree from about forty or fifty feet. The kid couldn’t throw a kick without landing on his backside and he couldn’t string together more than ten pushups, but he was pretty accurate with the stars.

“Sir, yes sir.” He snapped to attention when he saw me despite the fact that I was wearing ratty old sweats and a dirty wife-beater. Today’s zit was at the point of his chin and he had a dollop of Clearasil on it. “Sir, we haven’t trained in a few days.”

“Sorry about that, Billy.” The kid looked at me with a face sadder than Al’s. “We can train tonight if you want.”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“One ‘sir’ is more than enough, kid.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. Meet me at the Y tonight, but not in our usual place. Let’s meet in that aerobics room on the second floor around eight.”

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Geez… Hey, Billy, let me ask you a non-karate question.”

“Sir.”

“How has this crazy shit going on in school with the killer affected things?”

“Sir, kids are scared.”

“Did you know any of the kids at school?”

“Sir, I keep mostly to myself. The girls that were killed were cheerleaders.”

He said it like the fact that they were cheerleaders made him unworthy to be in their presence. I remembered what high school was like for guys like Billy. Teenagers weren’t a kind, accepting bunch, especially if you were a little goofy-ask Howard Rheinhart-and Billy was more than a little goofy.

“I’ll see you tonight, kid,” I said. He bowed and ran down the street.

I brought Al with me to the Y and took advantage of his low profile to sneak him past the front desk. The disinterested teenager knew I was a regular and didn’t look away from the TV as I waved to him. I had seen Smitty’s car was in the lot, like it always was, but I wasn’t ready to say hello yet. Smitty was a lot of things and in many ways a complex man, but he didn’t trouble himself with small talk. He didn’t care for bullshit ambiguity and I was ambivalent about just about everything going on in my life. He would look at me and I’d divert my eyes and stutter. For the time being, I decided to avoid him.

The Y was a sniffer’s paradise, and the combined aromas of bad BO, talc, and liquid soap had Al a little overactive. There was just a bit too much for him to process, so by the time we got to the aerobics room he collapsed on a mat, rolled over on his back, and started to snore with his four legs in the air.

It was five after eight and my karateka was no place to be found. Billy had never been less than half an hour early for anything. When he was fifteen minutes late I started to worry, and at half an hour, I began to panic a little bit. Something was wrong.

While I sat there and grew more anxious, it dawned on me that I knew very little about the kid. His dad was dead and his mother worked a lot, but I didn’t even know an address or a phone number. Whenever I gave him a lift he asked me to leave him a mile from his house so he could run home. I don’t know what that was all about-maybe he was embarrassed about his house or his mom. Shit, maybe he was embarrassed about me. Maybe he just wanted to run. I swear, working in human services screws you up for life.

It wasn’t like I ever needed to contact him-God knows, Billy made himself available. At eight forty-five I figured he wasn’t coming, and I left the Y more than just a little nervous.

As we walked out Al pulled me all over the Y, once again overwhelmed with the sniffles. When we hit the parking lot he was like a burning man who had jumped in a swimming pool. He seemed to relax and say “Ahhh…” We walked past Smitty’s Olds and were headed toward the Eldorado when we came upon Mitchell and Harter’s SUV. At first Al paused like he didn’t want to encounter the pit bull, but then he proceeded over to it.

There was no barking, so the pit bull probably didn’t take the ride that night. Al was back, sniffing like a mad hound. He went up one side and down the other and then focused his attention on the back gate. He got up on his hind legs and sniffed all over the handle, pulled back, and barked twice. Then he sat at attention staring at the back of the SUV.

I pulled him and he strained his neck, but he wouldn’t leave his position. There was no point in looking in the vehicle because the windows were tinted. I called to him and pulled hard enough to shake him out of his stance, but he continued to resist to the point where I nearly had to drag him. As we walked away, he whimpered.

I knew something was up the second I got to AJ’s. The Foursome weren’t talking and they were riveted to the TV screen. Kelley was there too, but no one paid any attention to me when I walked in. The TV was on MSNBC and they were in a special report.

“… It is a sign of ritualized murder, a thought-out process and one in which the murderer is expressing more confidence. He’s actually thumbing his nose at the authorities trying to apprehend him,” the head profiler said.

“The draining of blood from the bodies, is that a particular sign of something?” the anchor said.

“Draining a human body of blood takes a level of expertise. It takes a particular commitment to totally drain the life out of an individual, if you will, and it also indicates to everyone involved that he has the power to control others.”

“Holy shit,” I heard myself say.

“Two more teenagers. Throats slit, blood drained from them and discarded in a field. This is getting beyond sick,” Kelley said.

“This isn’t Howard. This is something else,” I said.

Kelley didn’t say anything, which told me a lot. All of AJ’s sat in silence for a long time, which gave everything an even more surreal feel. AJ’s and silence just didn’t fit together. When my thinking got back to normal I thought of Billy and got scared.