Dirtbags (5 page)

“Like Manson, or Gary Gilmore,” Calvin interjected.

“—but others are fortunate enough to get away. But how do we know for sure if they got away with it, or if they were just between murders?”

“Between murders?”

“Yeah,” Phillip reasoned. “You said the BTK guy had a number of years between victims. Others like Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac just
stop
. This Axeman fella . . . he just
stops
. What do you think happens to them?”

Calvin chewed on that a bit. They blew through Shreveport, all its glittery lights and State Patrolmen and casino boats . . . Phillip thought Calvin may have fallen asleep at the wheel, when suddenly he said: “Life.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Life,” Calvin said. “That’s what I believe happened to those guys.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You asked what I thought happened to those killers that got away with it, those who simply stopped killing.”

“I asked that over a half hour ago.”

“And my answer is
life
. Life happened. Maybe guys like the BTK or the Ripper or the Axeman or whoever got busy with other things. Like a job or something.
Something
. Something at some time makes more sense to them, and they can’t focus on anything but that.” Calvin’s knuckles whitened at the wheel. “Or maybe they just found something else to do.”

“Something else?” Phillip asked. “Like what?”

“Beats me.”

Phillip sucked on that for a bit and reckoned it as good an answer as he was going to get for now. Maybe they died, maybe they got sick. Or maybe, as Calvin said, something better came along. But deep down inside, he felt Calvin had the wrong idea about the whole thing, something that had nagged him since Calvin first showed up at his trailer. At any rate, he shrugged and watched his breath fog the window.

“Which brings me to my next point,” Calvin said. “When are we going to do it? When are we going to kill London’s junkie ex-wife?”

“I’m hoping you’re not planning to make a production out of it,” Phillip said. “You don’t have anything against getting it done right away, do you?”

Calvin squinted. “Look, I checked out the calendar. There’s a full moon on Friday. If we put it off until then, we can kill on a full moon, which has a bit of poetry to it.”

“Seriously?”

“But therein lies an entirely new issue. If we kill her on the full moon, then do we need to wait until a full moon for every kill? That might work, for planning and logistical purposes, but it would take damn near a year before we got a decent enough body count.”

“I don’t support letting the moon decide for us when we do what we do,” said Phillip. Of this, he felt certain. “We follow those cards that are laid before us. In the end, we are our own people.” He looked into the driver’s seat at his companion.

This shut Calvin up for a bit. They stopped for gas, ate some crappy food in a truck stop, and were back on the road in no time. After yet another stretch of cattle farms, a foggy Dallas skyline appeared on the horizon. Calvin pointed through the windshield, but needn’t say a word. Both of them knew where they were and what lay ahead.

***

Tom London had explained to Calvin that, while his ex-wife’s parents lived in the Dallas area, she’d struck out on her own after they’d separated and ended up somewhere in the city. All along, Phillip insisted that, these days, he could find anyone, anywhere, at any time. No one used phone books anymore. All you needed was an Internet connection and a name, and they had a name: Corrina London.

First, he used Google. He plugged her name into his smartphone and discarded the first several entries. Then he tried Facebook and found a profile and picture that hadn’t been updated in over a year. This caused Phillip to frown. He bookmarked the photo and continued to search. He scrolled through her Friends and selected several of their profiles, then scanned through them.

“We should get lunch,” Calvin groused.

“Hush,” Phillip said. “You do what you have to do. I’ll have her whereabouts in no time.”

Phillip continued his search in the motel room while Calvin went out for food. He returned to good news, Phillip greeting him with the cracked touch screen of his smartphone, and Calvin squinted like mad.

“I have no idea what I’m looking at.”

“The Facebook page of the Dallas chapter of the LifePath Treatment Center,” Phillip said. “It’s one of them rehabilitation programs for people addicted to drugs.”

“They have a Facebook page?”

Phillip shrugged. “They also have a Twitter and a blog they haven’t updated in five months, but I got what I needed from their Facebook.”

“You’re good at this.”

“I like to keep tabs on people,” Phillip said. He went on to explain how he clicked on this, clicked on that and, before long, found Corrina London tagged in a photo of a couple of ladies out for lunch.

Calvin seized the phone and stared at the photo as he ate his tacos. Her: waifish, undernourished, slumped and sitting, chin in her hands as she watched the other junkies stare open-mouthed at their plates of food. Her hair stringy and of unidentifiable color, skin devoid of flavor. A profound sadness that struck Calvin’s very soul as if it were a minor chord that resonated long after the song had ended. He stared at the photo until he was certain he could pick her out of a crowd.

“She’s the one,” Calvin muttered. “She’s going to change my whole world.”

***

The Dallas chapter of the LifePath Treatment Center stood as formidable as a prison. There were no signs, each brick individually mildewed, and neither Calvin nor Phillip could identify its color (
off-beige,
suggested Calvin). They sat outside the parking lot for several minutes, staring up at the building, wondering if they were in the right place. Panhandlers milled about the parking lot, bumming change from passersby, so they reckoned it very well may be.

Neither could agree on how to proceed. Calvin told Phillip to go inside and ask for Corrina London. Phillip insisted on a better plan.

“Like what?” Calvin asked.

“I don’t know,” Phillip said, “but a better one than that.”

“Can’t you hack into their records?” Calvin asked. “You’re good with computers.”

“I’m good with Facebook and logging into my email account. I’m not playing
War Games
with my cellphone.” Phillip studied the nondescript facade of the building. It gave no answers, barely let on that there were any questions. “Maybe we can admit you. Get you in there to move around and find her.”

“Admit me?”

Phillip nodded. “Sure, look at you. You’d pass for a degenerate.”

It was true. They arrived in Dallas three days earlier and had done little more than bum around the motel room and drink up the nerve to get the job done. The night previous, they’d simply gone into Deep Ellum for a burger and ended up ordering a couple of beers which had turned into cocktails, and as day turned into night, the floor became the wall, and the wall became the ceiling. No one wanted to do anything remotely resembling work that afternoon, but after counting Tom London’s money, realized they were running dry.

In fact, Rhonda Cantrell had grown suspicious. Calvin called her that morning and explained he would be a couple of days longer, and she’d peppered him with more questions than he’d felt comfortable answering. He parried what he could, but tripped up when she talked about goings-on in the neighborhood.

“You remember Melly Garnett?” she had asked. “From six rows over? She can’t find her cat.”

“Oh?” Calvin had said into the phone. The sweats were from the hangover, not nerves.

“Yes. It ain’t the first one, neither.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. A couple other cats have gone missing,” Rhonda said. “A dog, too.”

He told her it probably wasn’t nothing to be too worried about and promised he would be home as soon as he could. The thought of returning to Lake Castor, however, had sent him to the bathroom with a severe case of the heaves, and as he’d huddled near the toilet with the chills, he knew he and Phillip needed to hop to it.

A similar wave passed through him in the rehab parking lot, and he had no idea if it was the proximity to the half-dozen detoxing hobos or his own dehydration. He felt it was the horror of returning to that life in Lake Castor, the life without meaning or purpose, and he resolved to kill her quick and proper. He clutched his stomach and watched a bus pull up at the street corner with a handful of degenerates emptying out of it, adding to the already accumulating pile. He watched them through salty, stinging eyes.

“We can register you as an outpatient,” said Phillip. “Get you in there, you find her, and get you out. Maybe you talk to her and find out where she lives. But it will be simple.”

Calvin said nothing. His attention was on the bums at the bus stop. Several of them staggered across the parking lot toward the hospital doors.

“Or we could head back to the motel,” Phillip said. “I could use another beer and honestly, watching all this depravity . . . seriously, look at this trash—”

“Do you have that picture of her?” Calvin asked.

“What picture?”

“Her profile picture,” Calvin said. “The one from Facebook.”

Phillip shrugged and tugged his smartphone free from his pocket. He fingered through a few screens, then found it. He held it out for Calvin to see.

“Just as I thought,” Calvin said.

“What?”

“That’s her.”

Phillip double-checked the screen. “No shit,” he said. “Now we just need to crack the walls of this rehab and—”

“No,” Calvin said, “
that’s
her. Right there.”

He pointed across the parking lot, toward the group of shabbily clad folks headed from the bus to the building. Three homeless bums and one poorly dressed, dirty blonde girl with all happiness and hope drained from her face. Eyes that stared straight ahead, lost in whatever drug haze or fugue from which the poor wretch suffered. She was twenty pounds lighter than the outdated Facebook profile pic, and she hadn’t been that substantial even back then. But with shattered dignity, she put down one foot and then the other and tromped across the parking lot toward the doors of the methadone clinic.

“Holy shit,” Phillip breathed. “It
is
her.”

They stared at her as she crossed the parking lot in slow-motion. Neither man moved so much as their gaping mouths or wide eyes until she was well inside the building among her escorting hosts of heroin-crazed hobos. They exchanged surprised glances, and collectively, the air sucked free from them.

“This is quite a development,” Calvin said.

Phillip nodded. “Damn straight.”

“There’s only one thing we can do,” Calvin said. “We should reconvene at the motel. This is an awful lot to process.”

“To hell with that,” Phillip snarled.

He pushed Calvin by the back toward the front doors of the clinic, in the direction by which Corrina and the others had disappeared. The lobby inside was sterile, but a gently closing door gave them chase, and they sprinted toward it, stopping just inside the room. There, in a large circle of folding chairs, sat a congress of drug addicts, junkies, hobos, and degenerates of the first water. Some coughing, some spitting, all stinking in a fit of humanity that brought Phillip’s hand to his mouth.

“What the—”

One man in a suit jacket and jeans greeted them from across the room with a beaming smile and sunny cheer that could be manufactured for seminars and sales calls. “Come on in!” he chirped. “Take a seat. Sit anywhere. All you need is the desire to get sober. Please, come on in.”

Calvin froze. He looked to Phillip, who had nothing. Calvin scanned the room and found Corrina, dazed and staring at the floor, her sadness more profound in person than it had been in the photo of her at the zoo. Up close, she appeared worse off. Frail, timid, scared of her own shadow. Her hair didn’t really have a color to it, just some unwashed, nearly transparent and stringy shit dangling in front of her pale, patchy face. Her eyes, half-lidded, defied themselves. Despite looking as though she could fall unconscious at any moment, she seemed rabidly alert.

Beside her were three empty chairs. He and Phillip took two of them.

The man in dress-casual moved to the center of the circle. He was the sun orbited by filthy planets. He outstretched his arms in glory, as if he were a twisted shaman or faith healer. “My friends.” He smiled benevolently. “My friends. We gather to celebrate not our sobriety, but our
desire
for sobriety. Who here has that?”

A couple murmurs.

“I said,
who here has that?
”

A couple of weak claps.

Calvin looked sideways at Corrina. Her arms propped her up in her lap. She sucked gently on a lock of her long, stringy hair. He asked himself would he jam the blade into her, or slice it gently across her throat.

“I know, I know,” said dress-casual, “you’re not here for me. You shouldn’t be. You should be here for
you
. Every one of you. But allow me to turn the floor over to our counselor, the one without whom none of this would be possible. The person who works harder at the success of LifePath than anyone I’ve ever met. Ladies and gentlemen . . . ”

He stepped out of the circle, clapping like an idiot. For a moment, no one moved. Calvin looked around the room and waited for whatever counselor to enter and accept the accolades, but no door opened, no one entered, and his focus was so misplaced that he barely noticed Corrina London standing and moving away from her chair. When he did notice her, he hardly managed to contain himself, the desire to jump and tackle her to the ground so strong. If she left—if she got away—they would be back to Square One. However would they begin the hunt to find a cagey junkie who rarely bothered to update her social media profiles? But he held still. He held fast in his metal folding chair and was instantly rewarded.

Corrina London replaced dress-casual in the middle of the circle to great applause from the derelicts and forced a smile, which appeared alien to her face.