Brian Freeman - Immoral

Stride cursed under his breath. He thought about that sweet, innocent girl-about losing her, about losing Cindy. He was angry all over again. Angry that a killer had gotten away with murder.

And then he thought, It wasn't Rachel . He heard the mosquitoes at his ear again. Buzzing.

"I got something in the mail last night," Stride said quietly.

He inclined his head toward the picture postcard lying on the coffee table. Maggie glanced down at the photograph on the card, which showed a strangely proportioned, long-eared gray animal in the desert.

"What the hell is that?"

"A jackalope," Stride said. "Part jackrabbit, part antelope."

Maggie screwed up her face. "Huh?"

"It's a joke," Stride said. "A myth. It doesn't exist. People send postcards of jackalopes to see how gullible you are."

Maggie reached down to pick up the card.

"Edges only, please," Stride told her.

Maggie stopped, her hand frozen in the air, and gave Stride a curious look, as if she had sensed something horrible. Then she carefully picked up the postcard by the edges and turned it over. She read the message, which was scrawled in red ink, its letters dripping into streaks where rain had spattered the postcard:

He deserved to die.

"Son of a bitch," Maggie blurted out. She stared at Stride and shook her head fiercely. "This can't be from her. This can't be from Rachel. The girl is dead."

"I don't know, Mags. Just how gullible are we?"

Maggie eyed the postmark. " Las Vegas."

Stride nodded. "The city of lost souls," he said.

Jerky Bob lived in a trailer moored off a minor road a few miles south of Las Vegas. He had arrived, as so many vagabonds in the Las Vegas valley do, out of nowhere. About a year ago, the trailer appeared, dragged perilously by a truck that waited barely long enough to unhitch it before disappearing back into the city. A day after the trailer took up permanent residence off the dusty road, a hand-scrawled sign on a wooden stake appeared near the California highway. It read:

Jerky Bob

And then below it:

New Age Gifts

Psychic Poetry

BeefJerky

Bob curtained off one end of the trailer, where the rear entrance was, put up a rickety table and cash box, and opened for business. He hung dozens of stained glass wind chimes, stuck pyramid magnets to a metal plate nailed to the wall, filled shelves with incense burners and sandalwood candles, and handwrote epic poetry that he copied on an ancient duplicating machine and tied up in scrolls with purple ribbons.

His repeat customers didn't come back for the wind chimes or the poetry, though. They came for the dried meats: beef jerky, chicken jerky, and turkey jerky, sold in flavors like teriyaki and Cajun from shoe boxes inside an old refrigerator. Most of the people who stopped were truckers. It only took a couple of them, stopping out of curiosity, to start a buzz that made its way through the trucker network of the Southwest Word got passed. Going to Vegas? Stop at Jerky Bob. They came twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which were his regular hours. If they came while he was sleeping, they simply woke him up, and he sold them jerky. He made enough money each month that, if it had stayed in his pocket, he could have moved back to the city and opened a real shop, complying with health codes and paying taxes instead of flying under the government radar.

But money didn't last long with Bob. Half of it ended up down the gullet of slot machines. Half ended up in empty gin bottles, tossed from the back of his trailer into the desert, where they glistened like a field of diamonds.

He had committed suicide a year ago, but his body hadn't figured it out yet.

The truckers talked about it. Bob looked normal enough, a year ago, for a man marooned in the desert. From that point, month by month, he got older. He never shaved, other than cutting tangles out of his long, graying beard. His hair dangled in messy strands below his shoulders. His skin was shriveled and gray, and his eyes receded into his skull. He ate little but jerky himself, getting thinner and thinner until he was barely a hundred and twenty pounds. He never washed his clothes, which usually consisted of jeans and a Las Vegas T-shirt hanging on his skinny frame. The stench got so bad that some of his trucker customers refused to come inside, and they told him that even the jerky was beginning to smell. Bob just opened a window, letting dry, dusty air blow through the trailer.

He couldn't go into the casinos anymore. They turned him away at the door. Instead, he spent time every few days at a bar a half mile up the highway from his trailer, where he played video poker until the bartender got sick of the smell. Then he'd buy another bottle of gin and go home, drink, and pass out In the morning, or whenever a trucker pounded loudly enough to wake him up, he would throw the bottle out back.

Last night had been a two-bottle night. Or maybe it had been two nights ago, or even three. He didn't know.

He didn't remember much. On the television it said Wednesday, but he couldn't remember when he had started his binge. His last visitor had arrived in the afternoon, and that night, whichever night it was, he had begun pouring glass after glass of gin. And now it was Wednesday.

Bob sighed. He had to piss.

He stood up, propping himself against the wall for balance. The trailer spun in his head for a few seconds before righting itself. He stepped down off the mattress onto the floor and watched a few bugs skitter away from him. The two gin bottles lay empty a few feet away. He crouched, picking them up and staring inside. There was a small puddle of gin in each one, clinging to the glass, enough to wet his tongue when he turned the bottles upside down over his mouth. His body was sufficiently poisoned that the taste caused his stomach to heave, and he had to swallow hard to avoid retching.

Bob held the two bottles by their necks. He looked around for his sandals, saw them under a chair, and stuck his feet into them. The sandals flapped as he padded to the center door of the trailer. The latch had long since broken. With his knee, he nudged the door open, and daylight roared in. Still naked, Bob shuffled down the rusty steps into the desert behind his trailer.

The sun was ferocious, like a yellow fire burning out of control above the hills. His eyes squinted, barely able to open, and his skin tightened, starting to cook. As he sucked in each labored breath, a furnace of air seared his lungs.

His penis twitched, ready to release. He began pissing a virtually clear stream of urine onto the ground. The liquid raised a cloud of dust, then gathered into a small pool in an indentation in the earth. He kept pissing into the center, causing droplets to splatter onto his toes. He watched the flow intently, as if it were his life's blood leaking out of him. The urine was frothy and reeked of gin. In a few seconds, the pool would be gone, baked away by the sun.

The stream dissipated to a trickle.

Underhanded, he heaved one of the gin bottles into the air, watching it glint in the sun in a shallow arc before crashing back to earth. He heard the glass shatter and saw shards burst in every direction. Carefully, he repeated the ritual with the second bottle, enjoying the noise as it whooshed in the air and then smashed on the ground.

There were dozens of bottles in pieces out there. It was his private little minefield. Most of the shards quickly gathered dust, but the recent ones shined, reflecting the sunlight like laser beams.

He squinted, staring at the desert. He had only been outside a few minutes, but it was already time to go inside, where there was no relief from the heat but where at least his body didn't shrivel from the direct sun. His wizened skin had burned so often that he had small sores that oozed and never healed. He could feel them now, stinging as the sun burned them.