I had been riding shotgun in an endless caravan of rented cars, charter airplanes, Greyhound buses, Amtrak passenger cars and even a few motorboats for the past seven months, ever since that day in Chicago when I turned my life over to Slocum the way others turned their lives over to Jesus or Republicanism.
I entered his office, put twenty-five thousand dollars in cash on his desk, and said, “Everybody tells me you’re the best. I hope that’s true, Mr. Slocum.”
He grinned at me with teeth that Red Man had turned the color of peach wine. “Fortunately for you, it is true. Now, what is it you’d like me to do?” He turned down the Hank Williams Jr. tape he’d been listening to and waved to me, with a massive beefy hand bearing two faded blue tattoos, to start talking.
I had worked with innumerable police departments, innumerable private investigators, two soldiers of fortune, and a psychic over the past eleven years in an effort to find the man who killed my daughter.
That cold, bright January day seven months ago, and as something of a last resort, I had turned to a man whose occupation sounded far too romantic to be any good to me: Slocum was a bounty hunter.
“Maybe you should wait here.”
“Why?” I said.
“You know why.”
“Because I don’t like guns? Because I don’t want to arrange it so we have to kill him?”
“It could be dangerous.”
“You really think I care about that?”
He studied my face. “No, I guess you don’t.”
“I just want to see him when he gets caught. I just want to see his expression when he realizes he’s going to go to prison for the rest of his life.”
He grinned at me with his stained teeth. “I’d rather see him when he’s been gut-shot. Still afraid to die but at the same time wanting to. You know? I gut-shot a gook in Nam once and watched him the whole time. It took him an hour. It was one long hour, believe me.”
Staring at the three-story apartment house, I sighed. “Eleven years.”
“I’m sorry for all you’ve gone through.”
“I know you are, Slocum. That’s one of the things a good liberal like me can’t figure out about a man like you.”
“What’s that?”
“How you can enjoy killing people and still feel so much compassion for the human race in general.”
He shrugged. “I’m not killing humanity in general, Robert. I’m killing animals.” He took out the Cobra, grim gray metal almost glowing in the late June sunlight, checked it, and put it back. His eyes scanned the upper part of the redbrick apartment house. Many of the screens were torn and a few shattered windows had been taped up. The lawn needed mowing and a tiny black baby walked around wearing a filthy too-small T-shirt and nothing else. Twenty years ago this had probably been a very nice middle-class place. Now it had the feel of an inner-city housing project.
“One thing,” he said, as I started to open the door. He put a meaty hand on my shoulder for emphasis.
“Yes?”
“When this is all over — however it turns out — you’re going to feel let down.”
“You maybe; not me. All I’ve wanted for the past eleven years was finding Dexter. Now we have found him. Now I can start my life again.”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s what you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“This has changed you, Robert. You start hunting people — even when you’ve got a personal stake in it — and it changes you.”
I laughed. “Right. I think this afternoon I’ll go down to my friendly neighborhood recruiting office and sign up for Green Beret school.”
Occasionally, he got irritated with me. Now seemed to be one of those times. “I’m just some big dumb redneck, right, Robert? What would I know about the subtleties of human psychology, right?”
“Look, Slocum, I’m sorry if—”
He patted his Cobra. “Let’s go.”
ii
They found her in a grave that was really more of a wide hole up in High Ridge forest where the scrub pines run heavy down to the river. My daughter, Debbie. The coroner estimated she had been there at least thirty days. At the time of her death she’d been seventeen.
This is the way the official version ran: Debbie, leaving her job at the Baskin-Robbins, was dragged into a car, taken into the forest, raped, and killed. Only when I pressed him on the subject did the coroner tell me the extent to which she had been mutilated, the mutilation coming, so far as could be determined, after she had died. At the funeral the coffin was closed.
At the time I had a wife — small, tanned, intelligent in a hard sensible way I often envied, quick to laugh, equally quick to cry — and a son. Jeff was twelve the year his sister died. He was seventeen when he died five years later.
When you’re sitting home watching the sullen parade of faceless murders flicker and die on your screen — the weeping mother of the victim, the carefully spoken detective in charge, the sexless doll-like face of the reporter signing off on the story — you don’t take into account the impact that the violent death of a loved one has on a family. I do; after Debbie’s death, I made a study of the subject. Like so many things I’ve studied in my life, I ended up with facts that neither enlightened nor comforted. They were just facts.
My family’s loss was measured in two ways — my wife’s depression (she came from a family that suffered mental illness the way some families suffered freckles) and my son’s wildness.
Not that I was aware of either of these problems as they began to play out. When it became apparent to me that the local police were never going to solve the murder — their entire investigation centered on an elusive 1986 red Chevrolet — I virtually left home. Using a generous inheritance left to me by an uncle, I began — in tandem with the private eyes and soldiers of fortune and psychics I’ve already mentioned — to pursue my daughter’s killer. I have no doubt that my pursuit was obsessive, and clinically so. Nights I would lie on the strange, cold, lonely bed of a strange, cold, lonely motel room thinking of tomorrow, always tomorrow, and how we were only hours away from a man we now knew to be one William K. Dexter, age thirty-seven, twice incarcerated for violent crimes, unduly attached to a very aged mother, perhaps guilty of two similar killings in two other Midwestern states. I thought of nothing else — so much so that sometimes, lying there in the motel room, I wanted to take a butcher knife and cut into my brain until I found the place where memory dwelt — and cut it away. William K. Dexter was my only thought.
During this time, me gone, my wife began a series of affairs (I learned all this later), that only served to increase the senseless rage she felt (she seemed to resent the men because they could not give her peace) — she still woke up screaming Debbie’s name. Her drinking increased also and she began shopping around for new shrinks the way you might shop around for a new car. A few times during her last two months we made love when I came home on the weekend from pursuing Dexter in one fashion or another — but afterward it was always the same. “You weren’t a good father to her, Robert.” “I know.” “And I wasn’t a good mother. We’re such goddamned selfish people.” And then the sobbing, sobbing to the point of passing out (always drunk of course) in a little-girl pile in the bathroom or the center of the hardwood bedroom floor.
Jeff found her. Just home from school, calling her name, not really expecting her to be there, he went upstairs to the TV room for the afternoon ritual of a dance show and there he found her. The last images of a soap opera flickering on the screen. A drink of bourbon in the Smurf glass she always found so inexplicably amusing. A cigarette guttering out in the ashtray. Dressed in one of Jeff’s T-shirts with the rock-and-roll slogan on its front and a pair of designer jeans that pointed up the teenage sleekness of her body. Dead. Heart attack.