Sue Ann is standing behind me, as I sit here typing this, and she’s impatient for me to finish.
She doesn’t have any clothes on.
Which is the moral of this story, I guess: taking your clothes off can be very rewarding, if you play your cards right.
Public Servant
I felt great, my heart was pounding, but I should have slugged her harder. Or killed her, one of the two. I was hardly out the window and onto the lawn when she woke up and started in screaming her head off.
“Shut up, you bitch...” My voice hissed through my teeth like air from a punctured tire. “I’ll hit you again, Goddamnit, shut the fuck up.”
But it was too late.
Too late to climb back in and shut her up and too late to get away. I moved past the bushes along the side of the house and went back to my car in the alley. I could hear voices only a block or so away, so I had to work fast. I pulled the tactic I’d thought about a few times but never used. I reached in the back seat and grabbed my holstered gun, blue shirt with badge, and cap. Put them on faster than hell. Then I reached around into the front seat and flipped on the radio and grabbed off the mike and spoke into it.
“Ralph, hello Ralph, this is Harry.”
His voice came back tinny over the cheap squawkbox speakers. “What’s the trouble, officer?”
The mayor must have been in the station or Ralph wouldn’t have called me “officer.” Ralph was the chief but we didn’t have many formalities, not in a town of a few thousand.
“Look, Ralph, I think the raper’s hit again. There’s a woman screaming and I’m heading over to look into it. Okay, Ralph?”
He forgot the newfound formality fast. “Jesus H. Christ, another rape! Damn it, damn. Any sign of the bastard?”
“Ralph, I’ll shoot the damn bull with you some other time, okay? I’m going over and see what the hell’s going on, you don’t mind.”
“I better send somebody over to help you.”
“Good idea.”
“Frank’s hanging around the building somewhere. He’s off duty, but he’s the only one here so I’ll send him.”
“We’re going to get this guy, Ralph.”
“Damn right we will, Harry.”
I clicked the mike off and put it back on the radio and headed for the house. Things’d been happening fast. Almost forgot to zip my fly.
She was still screaming, so I didn’t go in. Besides, there was a crowd of people in bathrobes and dressing gowns and such milling around, and I had to keep them cleared away as best I could till Frank got there to lend a hand.
When Frank finally did show, I told him to go in and do the questioning. An ambulance, Frank said, was on the way. I stood outside and worked at moving the funseekers away.
After a while the ambulance pulled up and I went inside and helped Frank and some guy from the hospital ease the bitch onto a stretcher and out the door and into the back of the ambulance. She looked right at me once and didn’t bat an eye. The ambulance tore away and Frank stood there looking after it, shaking his head.
“Damn that bastard anyway, Harry, that damn bastard’s going to get his, I swear.”
“Same guy, suppose?”
“Sure as hell is. Same as always. Woman at home alone, her husband on the night shift or off on a National Guard stint or something of the like. The son of a bitch jimmies open a window and attacks her in her sleep, then knocks hell out of her.”
“Have a cigarette, Frank.”
Frank was in civvies, a T-shirt and white jeans as a matter of fact, and he stood there looking toward where the ambulance’d been, rubbing his hand over the place on his sandy crewcut where it was thinning. He said “Thanks” when I handed him the cigarette and lit it off his own lighter.
“You ain’t letting this thing get you, are you, Frank?”
“Guess maybe I am. Jesus, let me tell you, it’s enough to scare hell out of a married man. Christ, I mean you, you aren’t married, you can’t understand just how bad it is. But me, hell. A young wife. A kid in a crib. Me gone nights a lot. Scares the crap right out of me, a nut like this loose.”
“Sure, Frank,” I said. “I can see what you mean. I mean, I ain’t married or anything, but I can see what you mean.”
Frank rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Hell, Harry, how do you figure him? A psycho, sure, but how do you figure him?”
I smiled. “How do you figure a psycho?”
“I don’t know. I honest to God don’t know. But he gets his jollies making people hurt, I can see that plain enough. He always slugs hell out of the women, after he’s had ’em. Didn’t beat this as bad as the others, though, did you notice? Must be getting careless or something. Getting used to getting away with it. I mean, shit, we make it easy enough for him with our Mickey Mouse force.”
“We’re doing our best, Frank, ain’t we?”
“Yeah. Our best. Dedicated public servants. Yeah.”
He arched the hardly smoked cigarette out into the street.
“He’ll probably be more careful next time, you know,” I said.
“No next time about it,” he said, “not if I can help it.”
“Know what you mean, Frank, I mean wouldn’t you just like to get this bastard down and kick the hell out of him?”
Seemed like Frank’s eyes were almost glowing. “That would be sweet. That sure as Christ would be sweet.”
I patted his shoulder. “Well, we’ll get him, Frank, don’t you worry. I mean, after all, you figure him a nut, how long can a nut last?”
“Oh, but a damn smart nut, remember. There’s never a fingerprint or clue of any kind around.”
I checked my watch. “I wonder what’s keeping Ollie with that damn Boy Scout crime lab of his? He ought to be here by now.”
Frank shrugged. “Probably so used to this he’s finishing the Late Show or something before he comes over. Besides, what’s the use? That nut’s a thinker, he never leaves anything to trace him. Anyway, nothing a small-scale set-up like we got could ever pick up on.”
I lit myself a smoke. “But like you said, he’s getting more careless. Had so much fun raping this one he didn’t slug her as hard as he should’ve. Maybe this time he slipped up.”
“Maybe you’re right, Harry. Maybe old Ollie’ll find something this time around.”
“Here, Frank, have another smoke.” I shook one out of the pack and fired him up off my lighter. “Stay out here and relax, I’ll go back in, and make sure none of the neighbors messed anything up before we got here.”
Frank nodded. I went back in and looked around. Wiped off the windowsill with my handkerchief, a few other things, too. Had to make sure I wasn’t getting too damn careless.
When I was on night duty I’d go to bed around nine o’clock in the morning and sleep till six or seven. Then I’d go over to the Seaside Motel to see Molly, and sometimes sponge a meal off her. Molly was sort of my girl. She thought she was, at least. She ran the Seaside, which is right by the lake. Her old man, who built the place (both him and the old lady kicked off in an auto wreck five, six years back), would’ve called it the Lakeside instead of the Seaside, only somebody else on the other side of town thought of it first. And the other motel wasn’t even on the damn lake, ain’t that the shits.
The “No Vacancy” sign wasn’t on because the Seaside’s whole neon system’d blown a few months before. But a wooden sign hung in the window of the office saying no dice to any travelers. Not that many stopped, only the regular round of salesmen who filled the Seaside’s seven dumpy little cabins during the week and the teenagers and college kids who used ’em on weekends.