Words spilled from Steve’s mouth. “I knew the guy who lived here. His name was Marvis Hanks. Single guy… Are you sure this isn’t him?”
The coroner’s smiling face bobbed in a circle of illumination cast by Rafer Williams’s flashlight. Ching said, simply, “This isn’t Marvis Hanks, pal. I can tell a boy from a girl.”
Steve’s knees wobbled, but neither flashlight was aimed in his direction and no one noticed. He recovered enough to ask, “Anyone else in the house, Rafer?”
“No,” the sergeant said. “Not that we saw. The basement’s a swamp though. The chemicals were really burning down there, and the fire boys sluiced it down pretty well. Water heater was down there, too, and it was spilling water until we got the main turned off. We’ll have to check again but-”
“Damn,” Ching said. “Will you look at this.”
Rafer Williams redirected his flashlight beam. “Sweet Jesus. Who…what kind of a man would do something like that?”
The corpse’s jaws were drawn wide, locked, straining around a billiard ball. The cheeks had split like jerky and curled up, receding to eye level like slashed window shades. The billiard ball was singed and slightly melted, but the number eight was still visible between two rows of stark white molars that were bordered by blackened gums.
Ching whispered, “I’ve seen things, but…”
“My God,” Williams said. “The things that happen on a quiet little street like this one. After all these years, I still hate havin’ my nose rubbed in it. What do you think, Austin? What kind of a guy was Marvis Hanks’s boy, anyhow?”
Suddenly, Rafer Williams realized that he was talking to himself. “Steve?” he called. “Hey, Austin, where’d you go?”
Two flashlight beams swept the room.
Steve Austin was gone.
Steve swore at himself. At his hesitation. Paying attention to the stupid questions that danced in his head had done this to him. If he had lost everything because of that… If he had lost April…
He couldn’t believe it. Life had given him a second chance, and now-
Steve threw open the garage door and flicked on the light. The door to his fortress of solitude hung open. The top hinge was broken. The varnished oak was scarred, splintered. Steve stepped into the room.
Life had given him a second chance, and now it was gone. All his life he had wanted to break the distance. He had longed to feel the way other people felt, see things the way they saw them. He had wanted to smash the barrier that separated him from those simple emotions. But he had never imagined that the distance that cut him off from others also protected him from the world. It kept him from trusting. Kept him from believing lies and false promises.
And Hanks had promised him. Marvis had sworn to stay away from April. But he hadn’t done that.
Steve stepped over Doug Douglas’s corpse. The girl from the land of dreams and nightmares was gone. The empty husk of April Destino leaned at an odd angle in the far corner. It didn’t look like something broken; it just looked like something dead.
There was a note pinned to the dreamweaver’s cheek:
ONE CHEERLEADER FOR ONE MOVIE SEE YOU AT SKYVIEW
Skyview. The cemetery. For the first time since childhood, tears filled Steve’s eyes.
“You lying bastards,” he whispered.
To have seen April like that, in Marvis Hanks’s house. Burned down to nothing. Pugilistic Attitude… shit, he didn’t care what the coroner had called it. He knew that April had died shrinking from her nightmare, just as he knew that he would forever picture her lying there in a filthy puddle of her own oily ashes, an eight ball jammed in her mouth.
To have seen her there, like that. To see her here, like this.
To see her dead twice.
It was all his fault. Things had really gotten away from him. He should have shot Marvis Hanks dead behind the counter at the camera shop. He should have broken every bone in Bat Bautista’s body with his tonfa. Instead, he had worked his mouth. He might as well have told Marvis that April was in his basement. He might as well have told Bat Bautista, too.
And now the girl from his dreams was dead. Marvis was probably dead, too. But Steve guessed that Bat Bautista didn’t know that. Bat was busy setting traps at Skyview Memorial Lawn. He probably figured both April and Marvis were safe, well hidden until things blew over.
The note pinned to April’s cheek was the biggest lie yet. Steve was sure that Bat Bautista wanted to kill him. He stripped off his coat and shirt, put on the lightweight Kevlar vest he wore under his police uniform, and dressed again. Then he grabbed a shotgun from a cabinet in the garage. Sawed-off, double-barreled, loaded with number 0 buckshot-each pellet as lethal as a. 32-caliber bullet. He took some extra shells from another drawer and filled the pockets of his denim coat.
Something was wrong. There should have been a box of. 45-caliber ammunition next to the shotgun shells. Steve closed the drawer, opened another. His. 45 was missing, too.
Bat Fucking Bautista. And Steve had hoped to stop him with a friendly little warning.
Well, naivete was a bitch, wasn’t it?
Steve slammed the drawer, breaking the wooden knob. The missing gun didn’t matter. His. 38 police special was already in the Dodge.
In a matter of seconds, so was he.
He didn’t bother to close the garage door.
He was never coming back.
He gunned the sputtering engine and drove into the night.
He went to kill a nightmare.
11:30 P.M.
Lying in the bottom of April’s grave, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, Amelia Peyton sure as shit didn’t look like she was worth anything.
Griz Cody steadied the flashlight, and the murky beam filled her startled gray eyes. Griz had taped her mouth shut so she couldn’t scream, but her eyes were doing a pretty good job of it.
Jesus. Who wouldn’t want to scream? Lying in a grave, in an open coffin half filled with muddy water. Who wouldn’t be terrified?
The water part was almost funny. Before Griz could find the flashlight, Derwin and Todd had tossed Amelia into the grave. The splash had surprised everyone. Playing the light over the grave, Griz had noticed the bent sprinkler head, which was still dripping a tired trickle. Most of the water had leeched into the soil, but the coffin was still pretty full, like some weird steel bathtub. And the guys had tossed Miss Priss Amelia Peyton into it, dead center.
Derwin said, “Turn off the light. Her eyes are givin’ me the creeps.”
“Sure.” Griz thumbed the flashlight switch. He knew what Derwin meant. Amelia Peyton had given them a good scare, and it was hard to shake it.
Christ, this whole night was going to be hard to shake. First Bat coming over, telling him that Ozzy Austin, who was a goddamn cop for christsakes, had the film and was going to start trouble with it. That hadn’t sounded so bad at first. How much trouble could Austin cause? After all, April was dead, and dead bitches couldn’t testify about anything.
Then Griz had remembered what was on the film. What it showed him doing. He didn’t want anyone to see that. He had kids, for christsakes.
That was when Bat dropped the kicker, saying that Ozzy Austin was the one who had stolen April’s corpse. It seemed obvious once Bat explained it-the shattered beer bottles at the cemetery, and Ozzy being the guy who had practically invented graveyard baseball. And then there was the way Austin had always mooned over April, scared to talk to her and all that shit. And when Bat said that Austin had actually jumped in his face that very afternoon, acting all weird and everything…well, that was just the icing on the fruitcake.
So they went to Austin’s house, Derwin and Todd in tow, planning to kick the shit out of him and get the film. Or maybe even kill him, but nobody actually said anything about that. But Austin wasn’t there, and it didn’t seem very smart sitting around the place waiting for him.