Creekers (59 page)

The building stood merely as a drab cinder block edifice about the size of a typical trailer. Phil entered cautiously. A single low-watt bulb lit the dusty hallway. Another door stood open at the end. Phil decided not to call out; in the event that someone was burgling the place, the element of surprise would work greatly to his favor.

He walked very quietly to the next door, peeked in, and—

What the hell is this?

—noticed at once that this was no supply room. It was what it always
had been. A jail.

Three barred cells lined the wall. The first two were empty. Mullins bent over before the third, picking pieces of glass off the floor.

“Ya fuckin’A-hole dimwit. Ya busted a perfectly good glass,” Mullins griped.

But who was he griping to?

“Hey, Chief?” Phil spoke up. “What gives?”

Mullins glared up, his fat, round face inflamed. “What the hell are you doing here!” he shouted.

Then Phil saw why his chief was acting so guilty. In the third cell, which Mullins claimed had been empty for years, sat an unshaven, overweight young man.

A prisoner,
Phil realized.
Mullins had a prisoner in here all this time and never told me…

««—»»

“For shit sake! I was gonna tell ya!” Mullins insisted.

“Yeah, right, just like you were
gonna
tell me about how for the last six months you’ve been finding mutilated bodies all over goddamn town!” Phil was so mad he was shaking. “Yeah, you
were
gonna tell me, Chief, only you didn’t! Christ, you
never
would’ve told me if I hadn’t found out on my own!”

“Phil, you’re jumpin’ the gun here. Let me ex—”

“Goddamn, Chief! Everything you tell me is a crock of shit! And now this—” Phil extended a hand to the third jail cell. “You tell me you haven’t used the lockup for anything but a supply room, and now I walk in and see you’ve had a prisoner in here all along! What the hell’s going on?”

“Well, if you’d shut up and quit yelling a minute and let me fuckin’ talk—”

Once again, Phil couldn’t help but feel totally betrayed by his boss; this was the third or fourth time Mullins had oddly withheld information from him. Red-faced, then, he jerked his gaze into the cell. “And who the hell is this guy anyway?”

“His name’s Gut Clydes,” Mullins said. “Just another local punk selling dust and raising hell. Came in here one night all wired up and crazy, saying he’d been attacked by Creekers.”

“Creekers?” Phil asked, as astonished as he was outraged. “This fucking guy was attacked by
Creekers,
and you wouldn’t let me question him?”

“He said he was attacked by Creekers,” Mullins corrected. “Don’t believe a word of it—he was hallucinatin’, the fucker could barely walk, he was so high on dust.”

“No, I weren’t!” exclaimed the guy in the cell. “And it’s true, it was Creekers that jacked us up that night. And it was Creekers who killed my buddy.”

“Shut up, ya A-hole,” Mullins replied, “before I kick ya straight into the county can. Probably what I shoulda done in the first place.”

“What did you charge him with?” Phil asked.

“Nothing. I’m just lettin’ him dry out for a while.”

Phil rolled his eyes big-time. “Chief, you can’t just keep a guy in jail without charging him and filing with the DA for an arraignment.”

“Shore I can; this is a personal matter. I’m not charging the kid on account of his daddy’s a friend of mine. Figure I’ll let him dry out in there a while, and hopefully the fat punk’ll learn his lesson. Besides, he don’t want to leave—don’t believe me, go ahead and ask him. And I didn’t bother tellin’ ya about him ’cos I wanted to wait till he’d gotten his head straightened out before I let you question him. Shit, for a week he wasn’t talkin’ nothin’ except the craziest load of malarkey you ever heard, and he ain’t much better now.”

None of this sounded right, but it was beginning to occur to Phil that
nothing
Mullins said ever sounded right. True, chronic PCP users frequently required several days or even weeks to detoxify enough to regain their mental coherence, and it was also true that they frequently hallucinated. But at this precise moment that didn’t matter much.

“You think I’m bullshitting you, don’t ya?” Mullins challenged, his steely eyes leveling.

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I think I do.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know
what
to think any more.”

“All right,” Mullins grumbled. “The fucker’s crazier than a possum in a shithole, but don’t take my word for it. What do I know, I’ve only been the fuckin’ chief around here for thirty fuckin’ years. Go ahead and question him, then you can tell me about all the great reliable information you got out of the guy. Go ahead, go ahead, waste all your time—see if I care.” And with that final objection, Mullins huffed out.

Phil turned on another light and peered into the cell, to get a closer look at its occupant. The kid sat dejected on his cot next to a metal sink and toilet. Jeans, sneakers, baggy T-shirt, and a belly on him that rivaled Mullins’. Long, stringy brown hair dangled at his shoulders, and he obviously wasn’t given to shaving with any regularity.
Just another fat, going-nowhere redneck,
Phil suspected. But his name, Gut, rang a quick bell—one of Sullivan’s point runners, one of his “replacements.”

“So, Gut, what’s your story? How long you been in there?”

“‘Bout a month, I guess. It ain’t bad. Chief Mullins, he brings me in food three times a day, decent stuff from like the Qwik-Stop and Burger King, and takes me ta the shower ever so often.”

Qwik-Stop and Burger King,
Phil mused.
All the daily nutritional requirements for a growing boy.
 “Is it true you don’t want to leave here?”

“Well, yeah, it’s true.”

“Why’s that? Why’s a kid your age want to sit in jail?”

Gut ran a hand over his face, looking down between his feet. “I figure if I stays in here long enough, they’ll ferget about me.”

“Who’s they, Gut? The Creekers?”

“Yeah.” The kid gulped at the sound of the word. “The Creekers.”

Phil sat down on an opposite bench.
Typical. Drug-induced paranoia.
A common trait among chronic PCP-users. “And what’s this you say about them killing a buddy of yours? Would that be Scott-Boy?”

Gut looked up from between his knees. “Howdja know that?”

“I know a lot of things, Gut,” Phil said. “I know you’ve been driving drop-off points for some new dust lab backed by some money guy from Florida. I know you guys have been trying to take the local dust market from the regular supplier. And I know you’ve been working with Eagle Peters, Paul Sullivan, Jake Rhodes, and Blackjack.”

“Shit, man. Who’s been walking all over me?”

“Don’t worry about it. All those guys? They’re all either dead or disappeared. Your competition has been hitting them all, and they’ve been doing a damn good job. You should’ve seen Peters and Rhodes. Sullivan ever tell you why he took you and Scott-Boy on to drive points?”

“Naw. Why?”

“Because everybody they had doing the job beforehand disappeared. And there’s one more thing I know, Gut. I know that it’s Natter and his Creekers who’re making the hits. He’s been using Sallee’s as a distro point. I want you to tell me where his lab is.”

Gut looked suddenly perplexed, or just stupid. “Natter? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Natter. Paul never told me exactly who we were selling against.”

Jesus, not this shit again,
Phil thought. “Come on, Gut, don’t bullshit me. It’s nice and safe in there, but I don’t think you’d like the county slam. You ever heard the term ‘boy-pussy, cell-block bitch’?”

“I swear, man. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Natter dealing in flake. All I knows is it was him who had the Creekers do the job on Scott-Boy.”

“You saw Natter kill your buddy?”

“He was there. I knows it was him ’cos I seed him with my own eyes. At first I weren’t sure on account of I was so shit-scared. But once I got out of there and turned myself in to Chief Mullins, I realized who it was. It was Cody Natter.”

Phil took a time out, to control his excitement.
This was too easy. Five minutes ago I didn’t have a case, and now I got an eyewitness who can testify that he saw Natter perpetrate a drug-related murder. Guess I got up on the right side of the bed today.

“But it weren’t fer running flake that the Creekers jacked us up,” Gut continued, staring out from the darkness in his cell. “It was Scott-Boy, see? We picked up this chick hitchin’ that night—Scott-Boy had a mind to give her a goin’ over, ya know, we was out rucking. But it turns out this chick’s a Creeker. So’s Scott-Boy’s got her in the truck gettin’ ready ta do her, and all’s a sudden there’s Creekers all over the place, and they’se haul him out and slit him open right there in the dirt. It was, like, fer sackerfice or somethin’.”

Phil’s face drooped as he looked back through the cell bars
. What the hell is he talking about? “
Gut
,
you’re telling me the Creekers killed Scott-Boy as part of a sacrifice?”