Dreams The Ragman (3 page)

I grabbed a napkin from a nearby holder and sopped up a trickle of grease from my chin. “I’m actually here to meet up with an old friend of mine.”

The man looked at me as if for the first time, his beady eyes dark and suddenly more intense than comical. I expected him to say something in response but he didn’t.

“Not sure if he’s here yet,” I continued. “Maybe you’ve seen him around.”

He remained silent while I took another bite of sandwich, washed it down with a swig of coffee, told him Caleb’s name then described him. Even before I’d finished I could tell the man had seen him, but he wasn’t about to tell me that. Not for free.

I slid my change back over to him. “Keep it,” I said. “You know, as a tip.”

He cautiously took the money, and after a moment, said, “I have seen this man. Day before yesterday he come here and has coffee.” As if for inspiration, the man casually rubbed his belly. “Your friend,” he said, taking two fingers and tapping the bend in his arm, “he does the drugs, yes?”

Though it shouldn’t have, his question caught me off guard. I nibbled a couple fries to kill time. “I don’t know, I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“He looks like homeless man, drug person, OK? Sick, like he need help, should be in hospital. I think he sleep on beach. He tells me cops talk to him, give him shit, so maybe he leave already, I don’t know. Cops give him bad time because he’s bum. He’s not killer, too weak and sick.
Bool-shit
cops don’t know fucking nothing.”

“If you run into him again, can you tell him Derrick’s here and has a room over at Maggie’s place?”

“If I see this man, I will tell him.”

“Thank you.” I held my hand out. “I’m Derrick, by the way.”

“Spiffy,” he said, and then in response to my confused reaction, pointed to his sign. “This is Spiffy Grill, see? I am Spiffy.”

I wanted to laugh, but smiled and shook his hand instead. His grip was crushing. The pain reminded me why I was there, and any chance of humor evaporated.

Thunder groaned in the distance, somewhere far out over the ocean. The rain kept up as storm clouds overhead grew thicker, leaving the strip darker and even more ominous than before. I thought about Jill back home in her tight black dress and heels, thought about Louie sitting at the cottage looking out the sliders at the birds and squirrels bopping around the backyard. And I thought about that poor little baby rabbit. I ate the rest of my sandwich, drank the rest of my coffee and watched Spiffy busy himself. Finally, I spun in my stool and gazed out at the end of the strip and the sand and crashing waves of the Atlantic beyond, and thought of his friend Vern and the young wife and mother who’d been found slaughtered down on the beach.

I had to find Caleb and I had to do it fast. Although it was only a matter of time before more killings took place and federal investigators got involved, many years had come and gone since the original murders, and even the experts at the FBI were unlikely to piece things together or have any realistic reason to tie these killings to those in the past. In addition, the two witnesses who had briefly caught a glimpse of the hobo killer all those years ago had described him as a man in his middle fifties, which meant he’d now be pushing ninety, hardly a believable age for a madman allegedly hopping moving trains and butchering his victims along the way. Just the same, the last thing I needed was this place crawling with feds, because while this killer certainly couldn’t be the Ragman of lore anymore than he could be the same person who’d terrorized our town in the distant past, this was no ordinary haunting—it never had been—and he was no ordinary ghost.

He was many things, but human wasn’t one of them.

FIVE

Down on the beach, on the sand, out in the open, the storm was worse, more violent, the wind heavier. I trudged through wet sand, stopping near a partially-buried tangle of yellow police tape, the far end of which twisted and fluttered in the wind like a living thing. I froze. This is where the second murder had taken place. The young woman had been butchered here, right where I was standing. She’d been face-to-face with the killer, the evil that had haunted Caleb and me for decades. Here, right here, she’d more than likely begged for her life before and even while he’d bled her, slashing and hacking and tearing her flesh. And she’d watched as The Ragman slaughtered her, her eyes wide and alive, seeing all of it, every spray of blood and bodily fluid. Here, right here, she’d fallen to the sand and taken her final breath. I wondered if she’d been facing the sea when she died. Were waves crashing shore the last thing she ever saw? In those final fleeting moments, did she think about her children, her husband, the painting she’d been working on? Did she wonder how or why this had happened? Did she feel guilty, sad or angry, or simply horrified and confused? Had she glimpsed God, come to rescue her amidst a blinding light of warmth and love? Or had she been greeted by deeper darkness, cold and empty and cruel? Either way, real violence was brutally final, an appalling affliction no one ever completely escaped, because living things never die without consequence. We only pretend they do.

I looked back at the strip and an old decaying band shell overlooking the beach. Concerts had been performed here for years, before hundreds of people sitting on blankets or in beach chairs. This had been a happy place once, a place of celebration and joy. But no traces of such things existed anymore. Alongside the band shell, against the concrete back of a large building, an artist had long ago painted an enormous mural depicting several pop culture icons. Their eyes looked down at me like a jury that had already decided my fate, and perhaps they had.

I pressed on, following the shoreline and looking for hiding places, clues that might indicate Caleb had been here at some point, perhaps living on the beach, or at a minimum, spending his nights here. At the far end of the beach, around the backside of a cement shower that looked as if it hadn’t been functional in decades, I found an old and frayed plastic poncho. Next to it, a few spent cans of baked beans, empty liquor bottles and numerous cigarette butts were scattered about. I crouched down and pulled back one corner of the poncho. A small length of rubber tubing, mostly rotted, lay next to a used book of matches and an old rusted spoon, the handle bent back. Residue still stained the bowl. I guess we all kept our demons at bay as best we could. I drank too much. Caleb filled his veins with heroin and drifted off to worlds where none of this shit mattered. And The Ragman, he fed his addictions too.

I stood up and closed my eyes in an attempt to collect myself, but all I saw was blood, all I heard was screams.

I opened my eyes, imagined Caleb here; huddled in the rain in that tattered poncho, shivering and trying to make it through the night. Christ Almighty, I thought, how had this happened? Truth was he’d been dying for a long time now, wasting away while I listened to him breath over long distance lines. I took the calls in the middle of the night, listened to his drunken, drugged out ramblings, made sure he knew I cared about him and did my best to convince him he needed to get himself into rehab, but at the end of the day, I never stepped in. The rain kept coming, soaking me to the bone as I forced myself to remember things I’d tried so hard to forget. Like the times he’d call in the dead of night, whispering to me that The Ragman was killing him, taking his soul little by little, or the afternoon I received a call from a stranger in New York City who’d found Caleb wandering Central Park in tears, lost and confused and so strung out he’d forgotten where he lived. In a frenzy of hysteria, he’d somehow remembered my cell phone number and given it to a woman who had taken pity on him and asked if she could help. Of course she had no idea she was calling someone in Massachusetts, and once she realized there was no way I could simply hop in the car and come get him, she was kind enough to take his address from me and put him in a cab. When I insisted she let me reimburse her for the price of the taxi, she refused and promised to handle it. The next day, I called Caleb’s apartment and he’d answered as if nothing was wrong. He had no idea how he’d gotten home, had no memory of the incident in the park and not a clue as to how fortunate he’d been that such a kind person had found him. I should’ve forced him to get help right then and there. I should’ve saved him. Instead, I spiraled deeper into my own problems and assured myself he’d be fine.

Only he wasn’t fine. He never had been.

How could either of us have known, all those years ago, that a few decades later, the bright, confident and wisecracking young man Caleb had once been would become little more than an end to a bad dream, a hopeless junkie drowning in his own sorrow and bloody delusions? Although back then people could’ve more comfortably assigned such a fate to me, while I’d never found the Shangri La we all believe our futures surely hold, I suppose I’d managed better than Caleb had. But that wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot. And the game wasn’t over yet.

Why does it have to be this way?

I looked beyond the edge of the beach to the section of forest abutting it. Several miles beyond the trees the town proper began. The woods reminded me of those back home, and Caleb’s whispers across time, when one afternoon we’d skipped school and sat in the forest talking. Caleb’s father had caught him doodling in one of his notebooks and hadn’t reacted well to the homoerotic drawings his son had been scribbling. Yelling hadn’t apparently been sufficient, so the little bastard had slapped Caleb from one end of the house to the other, dragging him around from room to room by the scruff of his neck, announcing to the rest of the family how Caleb had been drawing “faggot pictures.” Humiliated and hurt, Caleb had fled the house and spent the night in the woods not far from his house. I’d found him there the next morning sitting in a clearing, exhausted and drawn.

“Why does it have to be this way?”

“It doesn’t.”

“I can’t wait to get out of here, to get away from this town and everyone in it.”

My problems were different, but I could relate. I wanted out too. “I hear you.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I can make it to graduation,” he told me.

“Maybe we don’t have to.”

He looked at me and smiled the way he often did when I’d said something he considered childishly amusing. “Of course we do. We’re sixteen, broke and live at home. Oh, yeah, sky’s the limit! The options are endless!”

“Want me to go over to your house and beat the shit out of your midget father?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Caleb shrugged uncomfortably and looked away, eyes moist. “He…he doesn’t understand, he thinks I’m sick, he…”

“Don’t defend him, Caleb.”

“He’s my father.”

“And you’re his son. You take enough shit at school and everywhere else.”

He wiped his eyes, forced a smile and said, “Let’s just go get drunk, OK?”

“Why don’t we leave?”

“What do you mean?”

“Right now, today, why don’t we just leave?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let’s go home, get whatever money we have. Pack up a few things, get in my car and just get the hell out of here once and for all.”

A bevy of emotions drifted across Caleb’s face before he responded. “And where would we go? What would we do?” He clapped his hands and laughed. “You’re a stitch! What is wrong with you? We can’t just run away.”

“Why do we stay? Think about it.” I sat down next to him. “Neither one of us has a future here. Let’s just get in the car and go. We drive far as we can get.”

“And then?”

“We get jobs, find a place to live, get on with our lives like other people do.”

Clearly struggling to suppress a smile he said, “Are you proposing to me?”

“Fuck you, you idiot,” I laughed.

“It’s a nice dream,” he said softly, “but that’s all it is, Derrick. We’re still technically minors. We wouldn’t get far before they’d bring us back, and then imagine how terrible things would be.”

“I’ll do it. If you will, I’ll do it, right now, today.”

He stared at me a while. “You really mean it, don’t you?”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, man. Let’s just
go
.”

In a few short weeks, the first murders would take place and everything would change forever. But in those few final days of innocence, anything seemed possible. We were still young, still kids, still capable of anything.

To this day I couldn’t help but wonder what would’ve happened, how differently our lives might’ve played out had he agreed to my ridiculous plan.

“We’ll be fine,” he’d assured me that day. “You’ll see.”

Within days his nightmares began.

I’ve been dreaming about your grandfather.

Rain sprayed my face, bringing me back to Sheppard Beach. Soaked and cold, I turned away from the forest and started back toward the strip.

By the time I’d reached the band shell, I saw a police cruiser waiting on me.

* * * *

Parked at the end of the strip, it sat there in all its intimidating glory, windshield wipers flailing back and forth in the rain, the interior of the car obscured.

I left the beach, moved onto the strip and headed back toward the bar. Just as I knew it would, the cruiser slowly backed up then crawled along after me. I walked right down the middle of the drag at a normal pace, the car a dozen or so yards behind me, engine rumbling above the wind and hissing rain and bearing down like the predator it was. I hadn’t been hassled by cops in years, but rather than turn around and look behind me questioningly, as I knew the driver wanted me to do, I walked on as if I didn’t know he was there. Spiffy’s place was closed and locked down tight, and the lights that had been on just moments before in the few establishments still open had all been extinguished. I kept moving until I’d reached the bar.

Once inside I shook the rain from my coat and looked over at Maggie, who was positioned behind the bar watching another soap opera. With her chin, she subtly motioned to the window behind me and said, “Got five-o on your ass, hoss.”

I took a seat, ordered a shot of vodka. “Been on me all the way down the strip.”

She poured my shot and pushed it over to me. “With the shit going on around here lately, I’m surprised it took this long.”

I threw the shot back, felt it burn all the way down. “Who am I dealing with?”

“My guess would be the chief of police.” Maggie lit a cigarette, threw her bottom lip out and blew a stream of smoke straight up in the air. “Real dick.”

“Hit me again.” She did, and I threw it back faster than the first.

I crossed the bar and headed up stairs. I’d just unlocked my room door when I heard someone come in downstairs, bringing a rush of storm along with them. I heard voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying, so I quietly slipped into my room and closed the door behind me. Heart racing, I removed my coat, tossed it onto the chair in the corner then sat on the bed and waited.

Seconds later the stairs creaked as someone approached. Footfalls echoed along the hallway and came to rest just outside my room. The sparse light under the bottom of the door shifted. I smelled a sudden pungent odor. A cigar?

My head was still reeling and full of the past, the sausage sandwich was sitting in the pit of my stomach like a recently-fired cannonball, and I was cold, wet and already tired of this sonofabitch and hadn’t even met him yet.

Three hard knocks rattled the door.

“Come in,” I said evenly.

A second round of knocks followed; these even harder than the first.

I strode to the door, and with a deep breath, pulled it open.

A squat, silver-haired man with eerily ice-blue eyes stood before me in an immaculate, regalia-heavy police uniform and black service shoes polished to a neurotic shine, his hat in his hands and a lit cigar stub stuffed between his lips. Behind him, a much younger officer remained by the top of the stairs, one hand resting on his holstered weapon. He flashed me a tough-guy sneer I guessed was supposed to be intimidating and probably had been when he’d practiced it in the mirror at home, but out in the real world where he’d just started shaving it was more comical than anything.

“Can I help you?” I asked the older cop.

“Gee, I sure hope so.” He grinned without showing teeth. “Like to have a little
chat-ski
with you,” he said, each word obnoxiously over-enunciated. “Think that’d be OK with you?”

“Is there a problem, officer?”

“
Chief
,” he corrected me. “Chief Ben Gleck.”

Clearly he was the type who got off on power and wearing a uniform. It made him special, you see—
official
—someone of profound importance, exactly the sort of individual who brought out the absolute worst in me. “OK, Chief Ben Gleck,” I said, “what’s this all about?”