Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

“It was your father. How else would you react?”

“It was more than that. He always had a roving eye for the ladies. But once there was a report of rape. Person reporting it wasn’t held in too high esteem. So Dad got off. Maybe he raped her, maybe he didn’t. Mom was always suspicious. I don’t know the truth. Thing was, it was Joey’s mom.”

“No shit?” Harry said. “That’s why you thought Joey’s dad might be one of the guys?”

“Yeah. She claimed Dad raped her, but he told Mom it was consensual, and when he wasn’t interested anymore, she cried rape. Joey’s father and my dad, they were gonna do a garage together, you remember that, Harry?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s what put the kibosh on that deal. I think Joey’s dad figured the old lady might have been lying, as neither of them were known to be upstanding citizens, and there was my dad, on the cops, which put him on a higher playing field. I can tell you this—Barnhouse beat her ass for it.”

“Joey know about this?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. He was used to ass whippings, so it wasn’t anything to him to see his mom with a black eye and a fat lip. You remember how it was. Anyway, when this happened—or didn’t happen—the department closed ranks. They got Dad off. Got the whole thing dropped. Dad might have given the Barnhouses some money. I don’t know. But there’s this thing hanging over his head, and the guys who close ranks are the guys who are now the chief and guess who?”

“The scar-faced sergeant?” Harry said.

“Bingo. They said they were with him, playing cards, some such thing, and he gets off. That’s what Mom told me anyway, and I’m thinking maybe she’s just telling me that ’cause she believed he did it. Maybe she just wants to get even for what he did with Joey’s mom, even if it was consensual. I don’t know. She still doesn’t talk about it. Anyway, he and Mom, they couldn’t work it out, so they split. In the meantime there’s been a rape and murder right here in our good citizen town. Not the first rapes and murders to happen here for sure, but this one is kind of strange. They don’t find the bodies for a few years. Truthfully, no one knows there’s been a rape, nothing left in the way of real evidence in that area, but I’m adding that in because of what you saw, Harry, in your visions. The murders, that’s certain from the police end, and you’ve filled in the blanks. Another thing is certain, they identified the couple, white girl, black guy. You saw them, Harry, both killed, up close and personal.”

Harry nodded.

Kayla opened up another file and slid it toward Harry and Tad.

“Turns out there had been other similar cases, just not as well hidden. Two others. Some of this, by the way, before the chief was the chief. He was just a cop then, on his second divorce. A scenario Sergeant Pale follows as well. But get this. Chief lived in a town called Millview before this. That’s a small town, and it’s had about five murders since it was founded, back in the late eighteen hundreds. And I got to thinking about how this all works, and I went to snooping there, making calls, asking about crimes in that area in the past that might fit this MO, and what I got was a very similar crime when the chief was a young man. Fact was, there were two of them. Rape and murder. Killer used a rubber, no sperm. So what are the odds, maybe five murders in their history, and two of them happen while the chief is there, before he’s the chief?”

“It don’t look good in the chief’s favor,” Tad said.

“Odd he would hire you…after murdering your dad,” Harry said.

“Not really. A power thing. Killed my father, and now he’s my boss. It fits, actually. Also, he likes to have me around to remind him about Dad. He gets off on this shit. There’s sex crimes in it, but it’s more than that. It’s about power.”

“I’m still not quite getting how this fits in with what happened to your dad and Vincent,” Harry said.

“Dad, he was protected by those two. Maybe…maybe he gets in with what they’re doing. I don’t know. You know, they’re riding around, bored, get to sipping. They get to talking. See a guy and a girl, and they don’t like it ’cause they aren’t getting any action, and Dad, he might have gone along with them, you see, just talking, ’cause he owed them, and pretty soon it isn’t talk anymore. They follow a couple up to Humper’s Hill. It gets out of hand. Dad doesn’t know his partners are serious about this shit. He’s not expecting it to go that far. I don’t know the truth. Maybe he was right in the middle of it. I don’t like to think that, but could be.

“However it goes down, he sees it happen. Later he doesn’t want to play. Doesn’t want to cover up. ’Cause maybe he thinks they’ll do it again. His conscience is bothering him and he’s not wanting to keep it a secret anymore—”

“So they kill him in a way to discredit him,” Tad said. “The kid, Vincent, they have to kill him too. It all goes to shit.”

“Then it gets forgotten pretty much, and the chief becomes the chief, and the sergeant becomes the sergeant and gets scared when you come along with the head movies. May not be the perfect scenario, but it fits pretty good. There’s some truth in there somewhere. Think I’ve got hold of what I like to call the spine of the crime. But, figured out or not, this I’m certain of: Now they got one more on their list.”

“The weasel in the freezer,” Tad said.

“No. He’s scratched off the list. Joey doesn’t count anymore. They got Harry here on the list. And if they get it figured right, you and me, Tad. Thing is, they do it right, they can make us look like the bad guys. And they got the whole department, the goddamn justice system, on their side.”

“The justice system, the police department,” Tad said, “they’re bigger than us.”

“Way bigger,” Kayla said.

“Don’t suppose you have a plan?” Harry asked.

“Not yet,” Kayla said.

“I got, like, a piece of one,” Tad said. “You know, I think there’s nothing going on up there sometimes, and then I get like a flash, and realize that, though I can hide it, I’m kind of a goddamn genius.”

54

A couple days later, the chief of police came home late at night, pretty worn out from what he liked to call a function, a goddamn cop fund-raiser where you had to smile, make some shitty uncomfortable speech; came home feeling stuffed and uncomfortable from a rubber-chicken dinner, some poisonous side dishes, came in the door loosening his belt, flicked on the light, and there, positioned upright on his couch like a fucking freelance contortionist or failed escape artist, legs coiled tightly under and behind him, hands tied so that the wire was cut near to the wristbones, propped there, glistening in the light, eyes milky, throat a big dark rip like an ugly second mouth in need of dentures, the first mouth sticking its tongue out at him, was this guy soaking water into the cushions, dripping more of it on the floor, stinking like an overthawed chunk of rib roast dipped in sewage.

It was the kid he and Pale had hung from the Wilkes’s boy’s light fixture. There was a cardboard sign around his neck. Newspaper and magazine letters had been cut and glued to the cardboard. It read: WE KNOW.

“What the fuck?”

Joey offered no response.

55

They were in bed at Tad’s house. Kayla rolled over and put her arm over Harry’s sweaty chest. “I give that one a nine,” she said.

“What? No ten? I thought that was pretty goddamn magnificent, if I say so myself. And I do. You weren’t faking, were you?”

“Now that’s an ugly question. No. But, we call it a ten, what have we got to work toward?”