Billie Mosiman: Wireman

They scuffled, the rain and the dark night obscuring their gestures. Hands fumbled, fingers slipped, bodies collided.

Sam saw the wire coming for him. He saw the fist swing out around his face, the thick fingers gripping a handle. Garrote , his brain screamed, God no…

Sam jerked his right hand up to his own head and the wet barrel of his gun was instantly slapped against his cheek by the force of the wire clanging into place. He screamed in pain. The wire was caught, stretched around the gun barrel and his neck. A horrible grunting sound of effort roared in Sam’s ear as the madman twisted and tightened the garrote’s wire. The wire began to cut through the left side of his neck.

Jack!

Sam tried to scream for help, but nothing came from his open mouth. Suddenly he was kneed in the small of his back and felt something give.

The detective sagged to the ground, and his attacker followed, struggling to tighten the wire.

Painfully Sam turned the barrel of his gun along the side of his face. He lifted his elbow and the gun moved slightly. When his elbow was straight and the .38 was pointed behind him, Sam fired.

The garrote dropped away, and Sam fell to his hands, his head down. The side of his face was burned black with gunpowder, and the skin was seared. The hammer and viewfinder of the .38 had ripped holes in his cheek. A scorched line on his scalp trickled blood and he was deaf in his right ear.

“Oh my God. Sam, Sam, are you all right?”

Jack tried to lift his friend, but they both slipped in the mud. Sam felt the younger man’s arms around his shoulders, trying to hold him.

“Let me… let me see,” Sam managed to say after spitting more blood. His head continued to ring.

He turned to look at what he had done. The body lay sprawled on its back, half the head and brains blown away. The rain continued to beat down in torrents. Water ran in tiny streams down the corpse.

“Shit,” Sam said, trying to get to his feet. He put one hand over the torn side of his face. “I didn’t want to have to kill the bastard.”

Patty Trumbine emerged from the woods, wet, bedraggled, and shaking with fear. He stumbled up to where Sam and Jack stood over the dead man.

“That’s one dead motherfucker,” he commented shakily.

A siren and lights blared from the gravel road. Jack supported Sam across the open land.

Garbo and three other men got out of the car and waited.

“What the hell happened?” Garbo asked Jack.

“Sam killed him, but got his face torn up in the process. He needs a doctor.”

Sam leaned on the Fury’s fender, bleeding into his hands.

“Think I broke my jaw too,” he said thickly.

Jack brought out a handkerchief to try to stop the flow of blood.

Patty Trumbine wandered to the driver’s door of the blue Chrysler and opened it. He saw the bowling bag in the center of the seat and grabbed it.

“Hey, this is heavy,” he called over the droning of the downpour.

“What the fuck are you doing, Trumbine?” Garbo asked.

Patty set the bag on the trunk of the Chrysler and unzipped it. He peeled open the vinyl top and let out a short, startled scream.

Sam and Jack both looked up at the same time. They followed Garbo to the Chrysler where Party was trembling and rubbing his hands together in the rain as if to wash them clean.

“What’s in there?” Garbo asked.

Patty pointed, turned away, and vomited.

Garbo reached inside to what looked like a wet, fuzzy stuffed rabbit. He entwined his fingers in the blond hair and pulled out Nick Ringer’s head.

“Who…?” Garbo held the head over the bag, his fingers twitching with the urge to get rid of the head. He wanted to drop it and couldn’t.

“Nick!” Jack exclaimed.

“Nick?” Sam asked, turning to stare into the rain-gutted woods. “Then who was out there? Who tried to kill me?”

The three men trekked across the muddy ground toward the woods and the body. Patty Trumbine followed, wiping his mouth. Sam stared down at the corpse and with the help of flashlights was able to identify the dark-haired brother, the one he had met in the house, Daley Ringer.

Lieutenant Garbo shook his head in bewilderment. “This man tried to kill you?” he asked Sam. “But I thought we wanted the one called Nick? What the hell’s going on here? Were there two of them in the car we chased?”

“They were both doing it,” Jack said tightly, backing away through the rain and mud. “There wasn’t one killer—there were two.”

Sam remembered the looks exchanged between the brothers when he had questioned them. He remembered the air of authority Daley had over his brother, the way he seemed to control everything that was said in the conversation. They were like two parts of one person. Could they have entered into a murder pact together?

Or did Nick even realize Daley was playing his alter ego? And in the end the stronger of the two murdered the weaker one. That’s exactly what happened and he knew it, knew it in his gut.

“We’ll never know which one was responsible for which murder,” Sam said.

“One of them did us a favor,” Jack said. “Jesus, how could they have done these things? Maybe Nick never did any of it. It might have been Daley all along.”

“No, the hair sample from the McCombie murder proved the killer was blond. Nick did that one. Blood tests and the footprint will make it conclusive,” Sam said. Despite himself, the older detective began to groan from the pain in the side of his head. When he talked, it was like being inside a metal cylinder.

Everything reverberated.

“They’ll dig up this place,” Jack said, sweeping his arm around the land. “They’ll find the missing… they’ll find…”

“Let’s go home, Jack. I need to get my cheek sewn up,” Sam urged.

Jack helped his friend into the Fury and stood a moment looking over the roof to the glittering lights in the woods. His hair was plastered to his forehead. No one could distinguish the droplets of rain on his face from the tears he was unable to repress. Willie’s death was revenged, but nothing would ever bring his son back. He thought he would feel better, feel vindication, and all he felt was a blank place in his heart.

Old and tired , Sam thought, fingering his aching jawbone. I’m just old and tired and I’ll never understand the crazy landscape inside a killer’s head.

He looked through the windshield and the rain. The green vinyl bowling bag still sat on the rear fender of the Chrysler. Sam imagined it filling with water, washing clean the bloodstained face of a dead man whose eyes had seen a tragic world—a man who had faced a tragic death at the hands of his own brother.

The Ringer brothers had come home to where death had always waited in Bloomington, Texas, home to where it all began one hot, summer day years before, when hate sprouted and secret fantasies took possession of a child. They had come full circle.

The wire that bound them together glistened dully in the rainy night where it lay on a bed of pine needles. It would never again vibrate with death. It was silenced forever, a harmless coil just beyond the fingertips of a man lying cold and rigid in the Texas mud.

Houston was now safe from the Wireman. But after forty years with the city, Sam knew one day another terror would strike. It could be tomorrow, next week, next year, but one day evil would come back into the world. And Sam would be there, he had to be, just as Maggie predicted. He would help hunt down the evildoers. While wiremen and gunmen, poisoners and stranglers and knife-wielding murderers stalked the innocent, Sam, and Jack, too, would be there to try to stem the tide.