The man wore a mask of red. He roared and tried to get off the floor, but I made short work of him with a kick to the ear. He went back down, howling.
“Are you Halliday?” I asked the woman.
She nodded.
“I understand this ain’t the greatest guy in the world. Mind if I take him out for you?”
She nodded again, which I couldn’t help but laugh at. I reached over and took the knife and stuffed it in the back of my jeans. I also grabbed the keys. Then I turned to the man.
“Let’s go, tough guy.”
I grabbed him by the collar.
“Get the fuck off me,” he mumbled.
“Shut up.”
I dragged him into the hallway and kicked him down both flights of stairs. When we got to the lobby, I pushed him onto the street and made sure the door with the cheap lock closed behind me. As I did this he took a wild swing, but his eyesight must have been shit-awful because he didn’t connect. I threw a kick into his knee, then hit him with the right hook from hell. Like a bag of wet towels, he hit the street hard and didn’t get up.
“If I find out you’ve been in that apartment again, I’ll be back,” I said, tossing the set of keys onto his soft gut.
The dealers on the corner turned. With that, I walked away. I must tell you, it’s a mighty fine feeling knowing there’s only so much damage a human being could do to me. Break my bones, I’ll be fine with the next full moon. Same thing if you were to take away one of my hands or legs. Personal safety isn’t something I think about, and after kicking that goon’s ass, I felt happy to be alive.
The Redskins cap and jacket were left in the first garbage can I saw.
My good deed for the day never made the papers.
The next night, I went back to the house on Carpenter Street. I didn’t have the money to play with to go see Alice as often as I wanted to, but I wanted to know what happened with her mother. I couldn’t very well call Alice up on the phone and say something roundabout like, “Hey, Alice, by any chance has some mysterious hero in disguise recently beat seven shades of shit out of the man your mother was shacking up with?” That wouldn’t be discreet.
Aside from being curious about the effects of my intervention, I just plain wanted to see her again.
I met her in the same room, and we did what we always did.
After, she told me that her mother had called. Some hooligan had dragged her man out of the house, and she hadn’t seen him since. The mother presumed he owed someone money, and he might be dead.
The mother was upset because she didn’t know if she had witnessed a kidnapping or not. Alice had told her to leave the police out of it, and to be happy that the guy was gone.
Alice didn’t want her mother mixed up in anything as bad as murder, but I asked her if she was at least happy that the guy was out of the picture.
“Of course,” she said, settling her head on my chest.
I smiled.
SEVEN
“The Rose Killer Strikes Again.”
This was the screaming front-page headline of the Edenburgh Gazette that smacked me in the face the next morning.
At first I didn’t connect it to the girl that had gone missing. My first thought, considering that Edenburgh was just about the sleepiest place in the known world, was that some deranged housewife had thrown a fit and went to work on a neighbor’s garden with a pair of shears. I was very wrong.
Judith Myers’s body was found in the backyard of someone’s home. The house was surrounded by a lot of land at the end of a cul-de-sac. Out back of the house was a deck, and past that was a large swimming pool. Past that, the yard merged into an orchard that stretched on for quite a ways. There were a few beach chairs set up in front of the pool in the backyard, facing the pool, but, according to the residents of the house, it was still pretty early in the year for swimming, so they never went near the pool. This means it took them six days to realize there was the dead body of a missing seventeen-year-old girl propped up in one of their beach chairs.
Judith Myers had been very pretty, but not anymore.
Her father was the local locksmith, and the Myers family were all churchgoing people. Judith sang in the choir. The Gazette painted the Myers family as the kind of people who would water a neighbor’s plants and collect their mail for them if they went away.
Judith had last been seen alive by her girlfriend who lived just a few blocks away from the Myerses’ house. Judith’s body was found over two miles to the east.
I thought about the church break-in. This shit was getting interesting. The two incidents seemed entirely unrelated, but if I had to put them together to make a picture, I would have presumed that some young assholes went out to paint the town red when they happened upon a young girl alone.
But, of course, they were unrelated, because the murder was the doing of someone called the Rose Killer.
The Rose Killer, as the papers had named him, was not a local phenomenon, which explained why I had never heard of him. He used to be someone else’s problem. As far as the reporters knew—because law enforcement sure as hell didn’t divulge everything they knew—his reign of terror began almost two years before in California with the discovery of a paid escort’s body just outside of Los Angeles.
He was a one-man plague of locusts, traveling haphazardly east, leaving every place he visited mourning and bitter. He did six in California, two in Idaho, three in Colorado, then two in Arizona, one in New Mexico, four in Texas, and two in Missouri. He had killed twenty women, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they had found and identified twenty bodies that he had cut the life from. They knew they were his because there were roses in their heads where their eyes used to be.
Judith Myers was the twenty-first woman to meet this grisly ending.
I vowed that the killer would never again be allowed to claim another life, because right then and there, as I sat in the kitchen at Long John’s, I decided that this motherfucking Rose Killer had made my to-do list from hell, and when the next full moon came around, I was going to take his sorry ass out.
I hate psychopaths. I’d dealt with a serial killer a few years before—this was in a place called Peoria, in Illinois—and I must admit that it was one of the high points in my career as a boogeyman. The difference was he was a local monster who was pretty habitual, dumping people in the river every so often. He wasn’t a ramblin’ man like this bastard seemed to be. The Rose Killer had proven to be highly elusive, not married to a specific type of victim, like Bundy was, nor was he uncomfortable with being in a dozen different places. He was adaptable to his surroundings, whatever they were. He blended well, or was at least a master when it came to blending into the shadows. In a bad way, a way that made me grit my teeth for a moment, this Rose Killer reminded me of me in the way he went from place to place, leaving blood and blues in his wake.
I didn’t know what to make of that connection. I’d been in Evelyn for years, but there was a time when I didn’t stay in one place too long. I didn’t want to be around when my targets were found, and I didn’t want people remembering my face or the fake name I lived under. The road was my home, and there was a strange kind of solace in that.
I remember when I came up with my fake name—the persona I would live under for many years. I was starving, and I went into this little family-owned deli and asked if there was anything I could do around the store to help feed myself. I had never looked for handouts before, and it was humiliating. I once had a home, a girl, a side job I’d worked when I was in school at a local burger joint, but at the same time, I was the walking embodiment of bloodshed, so who was I to complain? Without thinking about it beforehand, I had used a Southern accent when addressing this deli owner. I was the only guy in my company who had been born above the Mason-Dixon Line, and the Southern accent was one I had become accustomed to. What compelled me to use an accent at the time was beyond me. But it did serve as an excellent disguise, and continued to in Evelyn.