James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Banner print exclaimed “The Wages of Sin!!!” and below the words there was a crystal-clear photographic reproduction, with S.F.P.D. 9/4/74 written on the bottom. The words below that had to do with salvation through Jesus, but the picture in the middle caused me to shake so hard that it was impossible to read the exact message.

Jill Eversall’s severed head lay in the foreground in living black and white. The rest of her body was sprawled in the kitchen doorway. Beyond it, Steve Sifakis’s akimbo legs, blood-streaked walls and floor were visible. Shroud Shifter typed ugly ugly ugly ug — across my vision, then erased the line and replaced it with wrong disarray not ugly amateur disarray not ugly not bad amateurish not ugly not bad.

I ripped the poster off the pole and wadded it into a ball, then threw it into the gutter and ground the cardboard with both feet until my boots were soaked, seeing the Tahiti and Japan airline posters on Steve Sifakis’s walls and the original memory that had eluded me — Season’s lover hurling me topsy-turvy, darkness into light, similar posters on the wall as he beat me into humiliation. S.S. took on Country Joe McDonald’s voice and sang, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, stormy weather cause your pump to rust.” His voice faltered in mid-stanza, but I knew he was telling me to go out and buy a beautiful Polaroid camera to go with my magnum. Other instructions followed, not verbally, not typed, but telephatic. Only over the next fourteen hours, as I methodically accomplished each task, did they come to typeface life:

Buy the camera and film.

Go home and load all your property into your van, including the furniture you had originally planned to leave behind.

Drop off your keys with the old lady downstairs.

Buy a holster for your weapon, cut a hole in the bottom to accommodate the silencer, then clip the magnum to the springs underneath the van’s driver’s seat.

Sleep well, and take U.S. 66 east toward the Nevada line early tomorrow morning.

Dispose of all your furniture except the mattress after you are free and clear of the San Francisco area.

Keep the Polaroid close at hand.

Those duties behind me, professionally rendered and typefaced and check-marked upon completion, I drove east through lush Nevada pine forests, solo, with no Shroud Shifter as co-pilot. Traffic was non-existent, my gas tank was full, and I had three thousand, six hundred dollars in the glove compartment. The camera was an arm’s length away on the passenger seat. Mountains loomed behind the tall trees. I felt very peaceful.

Then I saw the hitchhikers.

They were a teenaged boy and girl, both long-haired and wearing Levi’s jackets, jeans and backpacks. I pulled to the side of the road and stopped, and seconds later the boy was at the passenger-side door, the girl directly behind him. With one hand I pulled up the locking button, with the other I reached under my seat for the holstered magnum.

“Thanks, mister!”

I fired three times, chest high, and from the way the boy and girl pitched backward I knew my shots had caught them both. Setting the hand brake and hitting the emergency blinker, I slid over the passenger seat and out of the van. The teenagers were lying on the gravel shoulder, dead. I looked past their bodies, saw that the shoulder dropped off in a small slope, and kicked the corpses over the side, then spread loose gravel on the blood from the exit wounds. A stopwatch with a ten-minute timer jumped into my brain, and I got my Polaroid from the van and ran down the hill with it.

The hitchhikers were lying in soft dirt at the bottom, joined in a jigsaw-puzzle posture — her head on the rear crook of his right leg, their fingertips crossed at divergent angles. The bodies reminded me of signal flags sending the word disarray in semafore, and I almost forgot caution in my desire to make them perfect.

But I didn’t. First I checked his chest and back, then hers, and when I saw a back exit wound on the girl and rips on her pack next to it, with no marks on the outside, I knew the spent slugs were inside. With my stopwatch reading 1:37 elapsed, I pulled down the zipper and tore through panties and blouses until my fingers hit hot steel. I put the rounds in my shirt pocket and let them burn, then furiously kicked a shallow grave out of the dirt surrounding the three of us.

6:04 elapsed.

I wiped the girl’s backpack free of fingerprints with my sleeve, then stripped the two corpses and threw their clothes and packs into the grave.

7:46 elapsed.

With the lovers nude, I placed the girl on her back and spread her legs; the boy I positioned on top of her. When the simulated intercourse was perfect, I snapped my first picture, watched the camera expel the blank print paper and waited.

9:14 elapsed

Photographic perfection imprinted itself, and weirdly, preternaturally, I knew the image was a clue to my fixations with blonds, Lauri the hooker, and things much, much older.

10:00 elapsed, alarms sounding, the realization that Shroud Shifter and I had finally merged as one. I covered the bodies with loose dirt and arranged heavy branches over the plot to hold them down.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

Giving myself commemorative bonus seconds, I put the snapshot in my pocket; saw that the blood on my collar was no more than the amount caused by a shaving cut; realized that next time I should steal money and possibly credit cards. When it was time to go, I obliterated my footprints by walking sideways over them on my way up the hill. At the top, the landscape was absolutely still. My van looked new in the fall sunlight, and on impulse I named it the “Deathmobile,” then drove away.

From Boss Detective magazine, December 28, 1974 issue:

Without the keen nose of Buford, a three-year-old basset hound, the bodies of Karen Roget and Todd Millard, missing since Thanksgiving Day, might never have been found. Buford, who belongs to Mr. and Mrs. J. Bradley Streep of Sacramento, California, was frolicking off his leash near a campground adjacent to U.S. 66 outside Hastings, Nevada, when, according to Mr. Streep, “He started yapping like crazy and started to dig in the dirt. When he came up with that first bone, I almost dropped my cookies!”

The bone was human, and Mr. Streep (who briefly attended chiropractic college some years before) recognized it as such and ran for the campground and his C.B. Meanwhile, while his owner contacted the authorities, Buford continued to dig, and soon unearthed the skeletal remains of two bodies, along with their clothing and backpacks containing ID, spare clothing and a collapsible tent. The keen-snouted hound was happily munching on a footbone when Mr. Streep returned with Lewis County Sheriff’s Deputy J. V. McClain, who gasped at the positions of the skeletons.

“The bodies were arranged in a... uh... posture suggesting sexual intercourse,” Deputy McClain told Boss Detective correspondent Robert Rice. “Even though decomposition was complete, you could tell what the killer had done.”

Shocked though he was, Deputy McClain radioed for reinforcements and checked the clothing lying underneath the bodies in their grave. After discovering driver’s licenses belonging to Sacramento residents Todd Thomas Millard, 17, and Karen Nancy Roget, 16, he recalled a missing-persons bulletin on the two. “They were last seen in Hastings on November 24, Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “Almost a month ago, and from the condition of the bodies I knew they were dead that long.”

The Lewis County coroner soon arrived and deduced the means of death. “From rips and bloodstains on their clothing and backpacks, it is safe to assume that the two were shot.”