James Swain - Midnight Rambler

Bash started to reply, then thought better of it. I answered my own question.

“Was she going to say I was the Midnight Rambler?”

The DJ shut his eyes.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“That's why you've been attacking me on the radio, isn't it?”

The DJ nodded.

“Was that Skell's idea?”

“Yes. Skell thought it would take the heat off him.”

Since Carmella Lopez's body had been discovered in her sister's backyard I'd been painted to look like the kind of monster that I'd spent my life chasing. Now I knew why.

“He's all yours,” I told Cheever.

Bash opened his eyes and looked pleadingly at me. “What about our deal? You guys said you'd help me if I cooperated.”

“Fat chance,” Cheever told him.

“But you guys said-”

“The only deal you're getting is a one-way ticket to Starke,” Cheever said. “Either you'll get the needle shoved in your arm, or someone will shove a broomstick up your ass. Those are your options.”

“But we had a deal.

” “We lied, buttercup.”

Bash's eyes floated to the giant screen. Jonny Perez had ripped away Melinda's bikini top and was cutting perfect circles around her perfect breasts. Bash tore his eyes away long enough to look at me.

“No deal?” he asked.

“No deal,” I said.

Bash started to protest, then went rigid in his chair. He slapped his hand over his heart like a dramatic actor in a play. I knew what was happening, and pulled him out of his chair and laid him on the floor. Then I began to pound his chest. But it was too late. He had already stopped breathing.

Heart attacks are strange. Some could last for hours, the way my sister's did. Others were over in the blink of an eye.

Bash's was quick, and he was dead in less than thirty seconds. I could do nothing but watch.

Years earlier, I had plowed into a deer on a moonless night, and stood on the side of the road to comfort the poor thing. As the deer died, a smokelike substance escaped from its chest. I told a doctor I knew, and he'd said that he'd seen the same thing with many terminal patients. The substance, he believed, was their soul.

I looked for Bash's soul to escape, but saw nothing. Cheever edged up beside me.

“Is he dead?”

“Yes,” I said under my breath.

“Shit, Jack, what am I going to do?” Cheever asked.

I looked at him, not understanding.

“I might get pinned with this,” he said.

“Because you punched him in the mouth,” I said.

“Yeah, and I provoked him. The review board will have a field day. I don't want to go through what you went through.”

I didn't blame Cheever for feeling this way. If I'd learned anything from my experience with Simon Skell, the only people society expected to follow the laws were those who enforced them.

The trailer had a small kitchen. I got a rag out of the sink and washed away the blood from Bash's lips. Then I scrubbed down anything Cheever or I had touched.

“How well did you know him?” I asked.

“I came by the station when he had porno stars visiting,” Cheever said. “I knew he was a sick puppy, but not this sick.”

“Did you ever use your real name at the station?”

“No.”

“Good.”

I shifted my attention to the wide-screen TV. Jonny Perez and the other Hispanic had stopped torturing Melinda and were no longer in the picture. Melinda was looking directly into the camera, fighting back tears.

“We're coming,” I said to the screen.

We went to the door and I whistled for my dog. Then I looked at Bash lying dead on the floor. His face looked as if he'd been dead a long time. As we walked out, “Midnight Rambler” was still playing on the CD player.

We left the station and drove our cars to a deserted strip center. We got out of our vehicles, and I took Bash's address book from my pocket and showed Cheever the listing for Jonny Perez.

Perez lived in a marginal neighborhood in Sunrise. Cheever suggested that we take his car and leave mine behind. He believed his filthy vehicle was less likely to arouse suspicion as we searched for Perez's hideout.

I agreed, and soon we were heading west on 595 in his car. Cheever drove with his body hunched over the wheel and his eyes glued to the highway. I sensed he was trying to shake off Bash's death, and tried to comfort him.

“Don't blame yourself for what happened back there,” I said.

He shook his head without taking his eyes off the road.

“Bash got what was coming to him,” I said.

Several miles passed before Cheever replied.

“I need to ask you something,” he said.

“What's that?”

“Do you love Melinda? I have to know, Jack.”

The question stunned me, and I jerked sideways in my seat.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Claude? I didn't sleep with her. Not yesterday, not last week, not last year. We never got it on.”

“But do you love her?”

“No!”

The pain showed in Cheever's face.

“I'm sorry, Jack, but you're the reason she and I broke up.”

“How is that possible?”

“She said your name one night in bed. She had this thing about me wearing my badge on my T-shirt. She looked at it and said your name.”

I hadn't forgotten the cartoon drawings I'd seen on Melinda's kitchen table, and the stick figure with a badge pinned to his chest. That figure had been holding hands with a female stick figure and standing before a house with smoke billowing from its chimney. Now I understood its significance.

“I'm sorry that happened to you,” I said.

Cheever nodded regretfully.

“So am I,” he said.

Cheever took the Sawgrass Expressway to the Sunrise exit and soon got lost. Sunrise had been built by developers and was a mishmash of identical-sounding street names. Fifteen excruciating minutes later we found Perez's street and did a quick sweep.

The houses were small, their windows covered with security bars. An alley ran behind the properties. It made spying easy, and we crawled down it and braked behind Perez's place. His house was a single-story concrete-block structure with a tar-paper roof and rotted hurricane shutters. A bike with two flats sat on the back porch.

“What a dump,” Cheever said.

I looked around the backyard. It was a disaster area, with newspapers floating in the dirty swimming pool and no grass. The place felt unattended to.

“I don't think Perez lives here,” I said.

“Then where is he?” Cheever asked.

Perez's trick of cutting the cable in his victims' backyards was fresh in my mind, and I gazed at the telephone poles lining the alley. It didn't take me long to find a thick black wire running from Perez's supposed house to the house next door. This house had some serious landscaping, plus a padlocked prefabricated storage shed in the backyard. Sitting in the carport was Perez's white van.

“They're in the house next door,” I said.

Cheever parked on the street, and we walked down the alley to look at the second house. It appeared to be a normal middle-class dwelling, except for the shed. It was way too big for the property.

“Wonder what's inside that thing?” Cheever said.

“Let's have a look,” I said.

A five-foot-high chain-link fence ringed the property. I picked up Buster and dropped him over the fence. Then Cheever and I climbed the fence and crossed the backyard. We took down the shed's door with our shoulders.

The shed's interior was easily a hundred degrees. I hit the light switch, and we cautiously entered. Hanging from the walls were tools and trenching equipment. Something was making me uneasy, and I drew my gun. So did Cheever.

We stood with our backs to each other and looked around. My eyes fell on a metal worktable that ran the length of one wall. Beneath the table sat eight coolers, each large enough to hold a human body. Buster was sniffing them, his tail wagging furiously.