Tom Piccirilli: The Fever Kill

"Yeah," she said.

Crease stepped to the door of the diner and stared hard at the guy out there. The rain had stopped but that clean smell was still in the air. He breathed it in and made an effort to peel back the years on the guy to see who was under there that he might know.

Hanging out of the pickup was Jimmy Devlin, swaying high in the cab and starting to honk his horn now. He was one of the kids from the high school who used to hotrod around and throw beer cans at Crease while he was carrying his father home.

On the trip back to Vermont, Crease had thought he might have to call the minor hostilities and resentments forward, urge them from the forgotten corners. Instead, he was surprised to find all his adolescent upsets crawling free again on their own.

Despite all he'd seen on the job-the twenty-floor swan dives, the Colombian neckties, the children murdered by their own parents, the maimed innocent driven mad by rape. The homicides he'd witnessed, the bad guys he'd capped, the junkies he'd cleaned out of the river, the ocean of blood and tears, and still the petty shit from his childhood got him going.

There just had to be something wrong with him.

He still remembered how Jimmy Devlin laughed. The way he'd chirp his wheels, and kick it into fourth gear from a neutral drop so he could burn rubber down main street, the smoke drifting across Crease's face. Cars flashed through his mind until he came to Jimmy's: an orange '84 Camaro with a Cat-back exhaust system. Seated four but he'd pack his buddies in back there, the girls hanging out the windows sometimes hooting, sometimes just watching. Jimmy would occasionally lob a beer bottle high in the air and it would smash ten feet in front of Crease, exploding like a shotgun blast. The noise would rouse his father enough for him to say, in his whiskey-soaked voice, "Take cover."

Crease walked back to the table and told Reb, "Finish your meal."

"He's got a knife. He likes knives."

Crease thought of Tucco and his butterfly blade. "Everybody does."

~*~

Jimmy was going to fat. All the beer had caught up with him, and his belly hung over his belt, arms thick and tattooed and sunburned. His hair was thinning, the crow's feet really digging into the corner of his eyes. His knuckles were wide and pink. He hadn't even wiped Reb's blood off his hands.

Crease wondered how Jimmy might stack up in New York. With that swagger, the pissant rage in his eyes, the curled lip. If he walked down 112th Street throwing off sparks of attitude, some high school kid might come along and jack him with a tire iron just on general principle.

He lit a cigarette and walked past Jimmy Devlin on an angle as if he was making for the 'Stang. As their paths were about to cross, Crease turned abruptly, coming up fast, and got in close. "Hello, Jimmy."

That put a slash of a sneer across Jimmy's face. "Who the hell are you?"

You could spend your life trying to answer a question like that, asked by the people who'd spent years making you who you were. Who you'd been.

Crease said, "I'm not sure if I should believe Rebecca, so I need to ask… did you really slap her around?"

Jimmy liked to call his shots before he made them. He unzipped his jacket and tugged the right side back, exposing the sheathed Bowie knife attached to his belt. Crease was pretty sure that kind of presentation wouldn't hold much sway, even in Hangtree. Maybe it scared the girls.

The sneer got sharper. "Yeah, I did. You want to know why?"

"Sure."

Jimmy Devlin was a talker, he liked to tell people his whole life story. Crease had met a lot of guys like him. In fact, he thought he might be one himself. "She asked if I would help her out with her bills, which I did. Gave her four hundred bucks. Not a king's treasure, but it hurt a little.

"She promised to pay me back, but I didn't care if she did. Two weeks later, she comes by my place, kicks back on my couch, gets cozy, we start getting into it. Tells me I smell and need to take a shower first. Well, all right. Except she doesn't want to come in with me. Fine. I go shave and soap up and come out to find she's taken two full bottles of Jack and stolen a hundred and eighty bucks out of my wallet. Didn't see her for another four days. Tonight she calls and says she's scared, she's stuck in a motel with a guy she doesn't remember. I go over there, get her, figure she needs some food and coffee. I stop for gas across the street and you know what she does? She runs inside and tells the kid behind the counter I need help with the pumps, something's wrong and gas is leaking. Kid comes out and she steals the plastic jug up front for the retarded kids, or maybe it was for spaying dogs. Whatever. She takes it and tries to hitch a ride with a trucker. He turns her down and she's standing there in the parking lot, holding the plastic jug. I had to talk fast to keep the kid from calling the cops, he thought I was in on it with her. I had to slug her to make her let go of the jug. There was maybe twelve dollars in it, mostly pennies. For that I'm gonna go to the pen?"

Crease stood there nodding, puffing on his cigarette. He very much wanted to beat the hell out of this guy, but the story sounded true, and the warmth he'd felt for Reb started to cool and his thoughts began to harden again. He didn't know what he owed her for saving his father's badge. He wasn't even sure it was she who'd done it.

He stared at Jimmy and remembered the crushed beer cans slapping him in the chest, the taste of it as the foam hit him in his face. The stink of the Cat-back exhaust as the engine revved and the girls in the back seat laughed. The bottles exploding. The old man lying on his back saying, Take cover.

Abruptly, Crease felt tired and the refined rage slackened at the back of his mind. He looked back to the diner to see Reb in the window, watching him. He wondered what it was that drove her to do such stupid things, one after the other, for no real profit. He figured the two of them could probably have a long talk about a lot of similar feelings.

"Okay," Crease said. "Call it a night, let it go for now."

"You act like we know each other, but I don't think we do. Who are you?"

"If I told you, you wouldn't believe me."

"Tell me anyway."

"No." The heat rose in his chest. "Now get going. Or do you have a problem with that?"

Jimmy's eyes flicked to the window and narrowed. He turned back to Crease and said, "Maybe I do."

Crease knew exactly what had happened. Reb had made another stupid bad mistake and thrown in with Jimmy again. She'd given him some kind of signal that he should take Crease out. Even if Jimmy did act out a little and punch her around some, he was knotted around her pinky. He always would be. She'd decided to deal with the devil she knew rather than take a chance that Crease might somehow be worse.

Crease said, "Hasn't she played you enough tonight? Don't be an idiot."

The diner door opened and he heard Reb's footsteps behind him.

Jimmy went for the knife. Maybe just to act tough, distract Crease, or maybe he wanted to see more blood. You couldn't always tell. You couldn't always read the truth in everybody's eyes. Some guys, like Tucco, and like the police commissioner too, said they could. They'd be there staring deep into your face, telling you they could see all of your secrets even while you told lie after lie until your mouth was dry.

So Jimmy was going for his knife. Still.

Reb's footsteps stopped on the walk behind him, and he sensed she was deciding which way to go, how to make it out of here. He could feel her fear as naturally as he might feel his own, even though he wasn't afraid of anything. He heard her hair wafting in the wind, the blood, knotted clump of curls tapping against the side of her face.

There was Jimmy, still reaching.