I remembered his words when I pleaded for my magnum. “No. Don’t ask me again.”
“Touché. Why?”
“Because they’re mine.”
Ross Anderson stretched and said, “Then I guess we’ve reached an impasse.” He moved to the bed and scooped up his death photos, and when he walked to the connecting door I was blocking his path. “Tell me about yours.”
Smiling, Anderson slipped the pictures into his shirt pockets, buttoning the flaps over them. Raising his eyebrows in a parody of a come-hither look, he moved back to the bed and sat on the edge of it. I looked around the room and saw that there were no chairs. Knowing that Ross had designed it that way, I played along and sat down beside him. With our eyes averted from each ether but our knees touching, he said, “No pun intended, but I’ve been dying to tell someone, someone special and safe, so I guess unilateral is better than nothing.
“When I was in my late teens I had a buddy, and we used to go pheasant hunting over near Prairie Du Chien. He was a doper and kind of a sleaze, but he let me call the shots, and he was up for just about anything. We spent a lot of time talking about the Nazis and the concentration camps, and he had a collection of daggers and arm bands. He actually took all that stuff seriously — the master race and the Jews and the commies, the whole shot. I was fascinated by it — but he believed in it.
“We were up near P.D. one day, right after Thanksgiving in ’70. Gunning for ringnecks with twelve-gauges, double-aught buck, which if you know wing shooting, is much too big a load for birds. You see, we weren’t sportsmen or game-cuisine lovers — we just liked to shoot things.
“It was about zero, and there were no other hunters around. We didn’t have a dog to flush the birds, and essentially we were just looking for something to do. We were carrying pumps instead of double-barreleds, so we were glad there was no one around — we were kids, and any real sportsmen would have been able to tell by our weapons that we weren’t serious hunters.
“About dusk we start heading back to the car, and this old fart materializes out of nowhere. Big old red-faced guy with a thousand-dollar Browning over and under, and about another grand in L.L. Bean threads on his back. He starts giving us shit about our guns, and didn’t we respect hunting traditions and where were our hunting licenses — and then — zap! I look at my buddy, we have this moment of telepathy and blow the old fart to kingdom come, blam blam blam blam blam — five rounds apiece — we vaporize the cocksucker.”
I stared at the wall and gripped the mattress with both hands; beside me I felt Ross breathe in short spurts. Finally he took a huge breath, and continued:
“Needless to say, we didn’t get made for the snuff, and we were both scared shitless until the job got pinned on these two niggers who held up a gun shop in Milwaukee and ripped off a half-dozen Mossberg pumps — the same model my buddy and I had. The jigs got convicted on circumstantial evidence, and my buddy and I went our separate ways, because we were afraid of what the two of us together meant.
“So five years pass, I put it out of my mind and join the W.S.F. I love being a trooper, I’m a cop now, above suspicion. To make things even better, my buddy moves to Chicago and gets married, out of place and out of mind, we haven’t seen each other since the day the splibs got sentenced to Life and we celebrated with two cases of beer and said au revoir. Everything is just peachy and I’m getting ready to ace the sergeant’s exam, and then blam blam blam blam blam!
“What happened was that buddy boy was back in Wisconsin, harvesting a weed crop outside of Beloit, living in a cheapo furnished room in Janesville. Friends of friends told me, so I went looking for him. I checked out his flop: pictures of Hitler on the walls, bags of weed all packaged up ready to go, hate literature on the dresser. Totally unacceptable. I found out he was taking I-5 to Lake Geneva every third day or so, to sell smoke to the vacationers there, and I got his vehicle stats from the Illinois D.M.V. That stretch of road was on my beat, I knew I’d see him sooner or later, and sweetie, I was prepared.
“The next day I’m parked, running radar checks, and buddy boy’s old junker cruises by. I hit my cherry lights and siren and pull him over, and he goes, ‘Hey, Ross!’ and I go ‘Hey, Billy!’ and we shoot the shit through the window for a few minutes, then I tell him I have to go back to the cruiser and check my two-way.
“Back at my blue-and-white I hyperventilate to sound panicky, then I call in a 415 — Armed Suspect, Officer Needs Help, I-5 north of exit sixteen. I go back to buddy boy’s car and shoot him twice in the face, then I take a Saturday Night Special from my pocket, wipe it and put it in his right hand, stick his arm out the window and pop off a shot with his index finger — blam! — out into the cabbage fields. When the other units arrive, I’m weeping because I had to kill my old buddy Billy Gretzler that I used to go pheasant hunting with. Naturally all the evidence backs me up, and the plainclothes troopers who investigate all officer-involved shootings check out Billy’s room and find Der Fuhrer and the weed and conclude that, all things considered, my retroactive birth control was justified. I had a rep for coolness before the shooting, but after it I got one for sensitivity. That Ross Anderson, boy. Killed an old buddy in the line of duty, it broke him up, but he kept on truckin’ and made sergeant anyway, Ross the Boss, what a guy.”
I took my hands from the mattress; they were numb from squeezing my way through Ross’s monologue. Wanting to distance myself from him, I moved down the bed so that physical contact was impossible, continuing to stare at the wall. The aftertaste of his story hit me in waves, a one-two-three punch of callowness, bravado and style. I knew something essential was missing, but I pushed thinking about it aside, and when Ross poked my arm and said, “Well?” I launched my own death travelogue.
But I didn’t talk about my killings themselves.
It was the long, small in-between moments that I spoke of; the law-abiding time that felt incriminating to my own heart; the self-imposed sentence of constant movement, different cities, renting hotel rooms and apartments to appear normal when sleeping in the Deathmobile would have sufficed; the dubious celebrity of being mentioned in detective magazines written for near-illiterates; tweaking the police with self-incriminating clues, a fifth-class substitute for Martin Plunkett in worldwide neon; being relegated to moronic alliterative titles like the “Richmond Ripper,” “Aspen Assassin” and “Vegas Vulture”; feeling the nightmares always there behind the thrills, emblazoned in the neon my name should be written in.
I stopped when the discourse started to feel like a giant genuflection to Ross Anderson’s male-model stylishness. Turning to look at him, I got an urge to maim his beauty, carve my name across his body for the world to see. He smiled then, and I realized the thrust of our respective powers — I emasculated with guns, knives and my hands; he was capable of doing it with a wink or a grin. The missing part of his story came to me, and I said, “What about the girls? The brunettes? You didn’t tell me about that.”
Ross shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. After snuffing Billy I realized how much I loved blood sport. I’ve always dug foxy young brunettes, and sport’s sport.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. The die was cast somewhere, and thinking about it bores me. Apples and oranges. You like blonds, I like brunettes; that guy they caught last year, the Pittsburgh Pistolwhipper, he liked redheads. Like they used to say back in the ’60’s, ‘Do your own thing.’ ”
I moved closer to Ross, my work shoes touched his spit-shined paratrooper’s boots. “Could you ch—”
Cutting me off with a wink, he said, “Could I change my M.O.? Sure. You want blonds, I’ll give you blonds. I’ve got a traveling assignment coming up. Check the eastern U.S. papers out, starting about a month from now.”