Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

“I’m going to change the subject.”

“Okay.”

She ran her hand down my side. “Want to make love?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m no idiot.”

“No mouse ears and Leonard took his hat back.”

“We’ll just pretend.”

“I can squeak like a mouse.”

“Baby, you say the sweetest things.”

We made love and fell into an uneasy sleep. Or at least my sleep was uneasy. Within seconds, Brett was sawing logs. Me, I lay there for a while and wondered what would have happened had Leonard not been there with me tonight.

The answer was obvious.

Next morning, early, I went to a hardware store and bought the stuff I needed and brought it home. Brett and I replaced the doorjamb and lock, with her doing the precision work. Stuff like that for me is like trying to write cursive on a notepad with my toes while taking verbal directions from a monkey. But with us working together, it was a fair job. It still needed painting, and I had forgotten the paint.

After Brett left for an afternoon shift, I called Leonard, invited him over for lunch. He passed, said he was having lunch with Cason.

I tucked a sandwich away, went to town, and bought some paint. When I got back, Leonard’s car was parked in the drive. He had let himself in and was watching the downstairs television, some show about the life of Willie Nelson. Leonard was a bear for all things related to country music.

While I painted the doorjamb and he lounged, I asked him:

“What about Cason?”

“He’s in. A couple of tacos and I had him on the job.”

“When do we go?”

“He’s waiting on a call.”

Cason had us meet him at the newspaper office, and then took us downstairs to meet Mercury, the man who collected facts. He told us Mercury had been with the paper a long time, and all he did was fact-check and catalog the morgue. He was seldom seen, and his work was rarely questioned. In fact, Cason told us that unless you needed something from downstairs, in what he called the dungeon, you stayed out of there. Mercury liked it that way.

Downstairs was like a hole in the floor with steps and it was crowded with more crap than a junkyard: boxes and files and desks and tables with stacks of papers. It was poorly lit down there.

Mercury had a desk in one corner, and the desk, unlike the rest of the room, was well lit by a gooseneck lamp. He was sitting in front of the desk in a wheeled, wooden chair with his legs crossed. He looked in his thirties, blond hair, blue eyes. A nice-looking guy with a real set of shoulders on him and a face that needed some sun.

He didn’t get up as we got closer. We went to him and shook hands.

Cason took a position on the edge of the desk, said, “So, Jack, you find anything?”

“The actual case you’re working on, not much. Thing interested me was the devil head at the scene of the murders. I ran it through the computer, and came up with some similar things, but most of it was not similar enough. Except for these.”

He turned in his roller chair and picked up the file and spun back around and gave it to me. I opened it. It was a thin file. But there were some crime photos in it. Some may have been suicides, some murders. There were separate photos of little red devil head drawings.

“You got these off the computer?”

“I got some information off the computers, but these photos I got through contacts and through Mrs. Christopher spreading some money around. You can thank her, my government friends, and FedEx for these. The devil head was at the scene of these crimes. Each crime took place miles apart. Let me see the file.”

I gave it back to him.

“There was… Oh, here’s one in Louisiana. Took place not long after the hurricane. The one there was a mobster. The devil head was made really obvious, was drawn on a mirror with the man’s blood. The others, they’re less obvious. There’s Oregon… Here’s one in New York.”

“You’re saying these killings have a connection?” Leonard said.

“I’m saying that there’s a devil head drawn in blood at these death sites. You want me to do your work for you?”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“Here’s what I can tell you. Those drawings are either connected, or someone knows about them and copied them for the murders you’re investigating. The drawings and the murders, or what look to be suicides-all of them suspicious-took place over five years. There could be more devil heads and more murders that are just not known. Or maybe the killer didn’t always do the devil head thing. No one like me has sat down and tracked this stuff, or had the connections to see how many of these devil heads are out there. Me, I like doing this sort of work. You start to see patterns in stuff like this. I’m big on patterns.”

“So, is there one person doing all this?” Leonard asked.

“Hell, it could be two, three, a copycat, or a weird coincidence. But it would be one hell of a weird coincidence, and since someone like me would have to put together the fact that there’s something to copy, I think a copycat is unlikely as well. Another thing. I checked out any so-called vampire connections to the devil head. Nothing. All of the murders seem unconnected, except for the ones that took place in the East Texas area.”

“So what we got is a serial killer?” I said.

Mercury paused. “You know, I’m not so sure. There doesn’t seem to be any sexual obsession. There is the devil head, a kind of signature, but maybe our killer just likes to sign his work. It’s missing the qualities one usually thinks of when using the term ‘serial killer’ to mean someone who kills due to some sort of sexual obsession.”

“Bert had his tongue cut out,” Leonard said. “His penis cut up.”

“Torture can be sexual, but I think this was punishment. I think the killers just consider it business. They wanted him to tell them something, and whatever they wanted, he told them. I can promise you that, truth or not.”

“Didn’t the Son of Sam just shoot people?” I said. “He was a serial killer that didn’t mess with the bodies. It was about power. That’s what serial killers are really after.”

“Yeah,” Mercury said. “It could be just like that. I’m not saying I know. I’m saying my experience looking at this kind of stuff for years tells me it may be something else. But, hey, when it comes right down to it, your guess is as good as mine.”

We went to the hospital and I told Brett we were leaving for Houston. She gave me a kiss and we tried not to make too much of it, me going off only a short time after she had come home, but the feelings were there.

I left her and we drove to my place, and then Leonard’s, packed a few overnight things. I saw that Leonard packed the deerstalker. He was swift about it, but I saw it done. At least it was packed and not on his head.

We tooled back to Camp Rapture to get Cason. He had needed time to settle some work details and go home and do his packing.

On the way over, Leonard said, “This is like being in a mystery novel with no detectives.”

“Nailed it,” I said, and we bumped fists.

We picked up Cason at the address he gave us. It was an apartment complex on the far side of town. Nice place. He told us he had just moved there. We didn’t give a shit, but he told us anyway.

Driving along, Cason entertained us with some amusing stories that mostly involved the misfortune of others, which, of course, is what most humor is about, and then explained we would be staying with a friend of his over Houston way, out near the airport. A former police officer.

What he didn’t tell us was the former police officer was a hot late-twenties blonde named Constance and she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a cat named Yo-Yo. She put Leonard and me in the living room, him on the couch, me on a blow-up mattress. We lay there listening to Cason and Constance all night long. For all I knew, maybe Yo-Yo was involved. There was a banging of heads on the bedstead, a whimpering of delight, a cry of servitude, a yelp of triumph, and a smacking of genitals that sounded like someone snapping a leather strap across bucket seats. After a few hours it ceased, then near morning it started up again, loud enough to wake us. Once I thought a siren had gone off, but it was just Constance.