Leather Maiden (24 page)

Booger opened the envelope. He looked inside. He made a grunting noise.

I took it from him and read it. It said:

DON'T BUMP THE TELESCOPE. LOOK THROUGH IT AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU SEE.

I got hold of the chair Ronnie's remains were in and moved it back so that I could get to the telescope. A corpse without its insides is very light.

When I finished moving her, Booger took out a handkerchief and wiped down the chair where I had touched it. He studied the corpse, said, “Looks like she's been frozen and stored in salt. There's still salt in her hair, and the rest of her looks and smells like freezer burn.”

“What she smells like is dead,” I said.

“I had some fish sticks went bad smelled like that.”

I turned my attention to where the telescope was pointing. There was smoke and dust grimed over the other windows in the church, but this one had been cleaned, and I could even smell a bit of window cleaner in the air.

I didn't touch the telescope, just looked through it. It wasn't an expensive telescope, but it was powerful enough, and for a moment I wasn't sure what I was looking at. Then I realized exactly what I was seeing. A slow warm horror settled over me.

A few blocks over. Belinda's house. It was lined up dead center in the telescope.

37

We parked at the rear of Belinda's house, at the curb. It was dark behind the windows. When we got to the back door, Booger used his little lock pick and it opened easily. This time I had my flashlight, and I moved the beam around as we walked inside. The house was silent and there was a kind of emptiness about the place, like a funeral home. There was a faint smell of the bread candle in the air. I hesitated a moment, and then I couldn't help myself; I said, “Belinda?”

I turned to look for Booger, but he had already gone deep inside and was moving through the dark like, well, like a copper cat.

I turned on a light. Booger was standing in the open bedroom doorway, blocking it. He said, “All we needed was you banging some fucking cymbals and blowing a kazoo with your asshole. Man, don't lose your focus, woman or no woman. Come here.”

I followed him through the doorway, into Belinda's bedroom. The bread smell was strong in there, and the door to the bathroom was open. Booger went over and leaned against the doorjamb. I peeked in. There was water in the tub, some soap scum on the water. There was a throw-away razor on the edge of the tub along with some kind of shaving gel. There were splashes of water all over the floor.

“She's in here getting a bath, shaving her legs, and they came in on her,” Booger said. He went over and sat on the edge of the tub and dropped his hand in the water. “Water's still warm, she just ran it and had most likely got in. The floor's wet, so they pulled her out. Gals don't like to get out wet. They dry.”

“Damn,” I said, and I felt my knees get weak.

“No time for that shit,” Booger said. “Let's check the place good.”

We went into the kitchen. I saw there was a note propped up on the kitchen table. I had seen it earlier, but it hadn't really caught my eye, as I was looking for Belinda.

I eased over and took it and opened it. Unlike the others, it was written in a tight little script by someone who fancied themselves stylish.

It read:

WE KNOW A LOT ABOUT YOU AND A LOT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW YOU, AND WE HAVE BORROWED ONE OF THEM. WE WANT YOU TO KNOW WHAT YOU'RE UP AGAINST AND TO UNDERSTAND THAT WE ARE ABSOLUTELY RUTHLESS AND PROUD OF IT. SHE MIGHT BE OKAY AND SHE MIGHT NOT. WE ARE THINKING OF REMOVING HER BRACES WITH PLIERS AND EXTREME PREJUDICE. GO HOME. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS. SHE RESTS IN THE TRUNK OF OUR CAR FOR NOW, BUT THAT IS NOT AS DARK AND AS TIGHT A PLACE AS SHE MAY END UP. SKIN COMES LOOSE EASY WITH THE RIGHT KNIFE AND PLENTY OF EXPERIENCE.

I sat down in a chair at the table. Booger came over and picked up the note and read it. “Look here,” he said. “She's dead, she's dead. If she's alive, we got a chance to get her back. I don't know her and it's not anything to me, but it's something to you, so that makes it my business. Now get your shit together and let's go to your place and wait for instructions.”

I nodded.

Booger clamped his hand down on my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Just like when we was over in Sand World, you got to cinch up your drawers and get to cracking before you get a bullet in the head and your pants fill with shit. Got me?”

I nodded again and got up. Booger drove us back to my place.

When we opened the door and turned on the light, lying on the floor, near the motorcycle, was yet another note. It had been slipped under the door.

“These fuckers are quick,” Booger said. “A little too quick.”

“There's more than one,” I said.

“Yep. And they stay in communication by cell phone. People sneaking around behind my back, it chaps my ass, partner.”

I read the note. It said: “Call this number.”

I studied the number, then called it.

There was an answer right away. A man's voice, almost singsong-like.

“Mr. Statler. You have been drawn in, and now that you are in, I should tell you that we have captured your queen.”

“I don't get it,” I said, although I did.

“It's a game, and your brother brought you in, and then you became a player in the game. But that's all you are, a player. A pawn. A knight maybe. There are others and you don't know their will, and you do not know our purpose.”

“Belinda has nothing to do with this,” I said. “Actually, neither do I.”

“She is with you, and therefore, by extension, she is in the game because you are, and we have decided you have something to do with it, and that is good enough.”

“A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse, huh?”

“Exactly,” the voice said.

“Let her go, and I'll take her place.”

“Doesn't work that way. And another thing, you have brought another player into the game. The high yellow you got with you. Intriguing, isn't it, that we should know so much? We know a lot about you because we have been watching you. Acknowledge to him that we know he is there.”

“He knows you know, and he doesn't give a damn,” I said.

“Acknowledge.”

I paused and said to Booger, loud as I could: “He says I should acknowledge that they know you are here, and that you are a high yellow.”

“I think I'm more copper-colored,” Booger said.

“Okay,” I said back into the phone. “I told him, and I owe you one for the punch in the face and the kick in the ribs.”

“You hear quite well. Perhaps you have good instincts. Perhaps it's your time in Iraq that has made you alert, paranoid maybe. But remember, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Now, we will trade your brother for the girl. We consider him a more important piece in the game.”

“Who's we?”

The voice on the phone laughed. “Now that would be telling, wouldn't it? That would ruin the game.”

“This is no game, buddy,” I said.

“Sure it is. Sooner you figure that out, the better, because all that matters is how you play the game. There is no purpose to life, Mr. Statler. There is only chaos from which you can create purpose, and a game is as purposeful as you can get. There is no real reason anyone feels for anyone other than the lie we tell ourselves. The lie where we make importance out of the simplicity of emptiness.”

“You ought to put that last line in a fortune cookie,” I said. “The rest of that shit, it would take a whole box of cookies to say it. And it would still be shit.”

“Insults,” the voice said. “I'd save them right now. I was saying how you failed to take no for an answer, when in the end a no is as good as a yes. Humans are fools. They try and jump-start the dead; dead people and dead ideas. We convince ourselves there is more to our life than there is, and truth is, we are nothing more than empty shells motivated by some kind of electrical current. To make it through the years, we create games. The success game. The marriage game. The war game. The life game. The race game. The religion game. That's okay. I play them all, to some extent. Or have played them. But the difference in you and me is that I know I'm playing.”

“What do you really want?” I said. “Because if you want my brother, you won't get him. I couldn't give him to you if I wanted to. He went out of state and didn't tell me where, and I told him not to tell me.”

I tried to tell the lie as convincingly as I could.

The voice on the other end didn't speak right away. I could hear him breathing, though.

Finally the voice said, “I'm going to accept that, because we only wanted him so we could have all the game pieces, but you, you have become one of the most important players in our game.”

“I thought I was an insignificant pawn,” I said.

“Not anymore. As for your brother, we will, at least for the moment, consider him removed from the board.”

“Then what's the new plan?” I asked.

“We want you to wait. And this phone. It's a one-time shot, baby. When I hang up I destroy it. You can't find me by this phone, and if you want to stay in the game, you got to hang tight. Hang tight and wait for instructions. They will come soon. Don't call the cops. Keep the high yellow out of it. One false move, and this pretty girl of yours, who, by the way, is without clothes, only a bathrobe, will be a whole lot less pretty. So again, wait for instructions.”

“I hope the instructions will be briefer than the line of shit I've been hearing.”

“Have you ever seen a woman skinned?” the voice said. “It is quite a process. And the women, they are very noisy during the process.”

I was about to respond when the connection was dropped.

“Sonofabitch,” I said, and raised the phone to toss it, then thought better of it. I closed it and shoved it into my pocket.

         

“Well,” Booger said, stretching out on the couch, “we got plenty of beer.”

I was sitting in my one really comfortable chair, having just explained to him in a nutshell all that had been said to me.

“There's nothing funny about this, Booger.”

“Am I smiling?”

“You are.”

“You know me. I get curious, I smile. First thing I'd consider is how much this gal means to you. She's just like a good poke, well, they're making new pussy every few minutes.”

“What in hell are you saying, Booger?”

“I'm saying, she don't mean that much to you, me and you can pack up your car and go back to my bar, or damn near anyplace you want to go until the money runs out, then we can make some more and go somewhere else.”

“It's not like that for me,” I said.

“I know it isn't. But I had to say it. Thing is, I understand what the guy told you. He makes sense. It's true.”

“Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about things, stuff he says makes sense,” I said. “Rest of the time, not so much.”

“All that matters is that he believes it.”

“Or that they do,” I said. “He keeps saying
we.
”

Booger studied me for a long moment, like maybe it was the first time he had ever looked at me. He said, “On your scale, do I rate somewhere?”

“You're on the scale, Booger.”

“Where?”

“You're on it. That's as good as I can say. I've kind of got other things on my mind right now.”

Booger took a swallow of his beer. “All right,” he said, still not looking right at me. “That'll do. That Caroline girl, she's not dead.”

“What?”

“The picture they sent of the three dead girls. The Caroline girl. Way I figure it, she's not dead. At least that's not her in the picture.”

Booger got the photo, put it on the table. “I thought this looked wrong before, but we got caught up in other business. I been thinking on it again. It's Photoshopped, my friend. What you got here is the girl in the middle, twice. Ronnie it says. The one called Caroline, that's Ronnie again, but with a blond wig on. It's shot in the same place, and they've covered her up some so she'll look different, and it's a reverse image, but it's her. You see that little mole on Ronnie's cheek? I got a good look at it earlier. When we were in the church with her body. The mole is prominent, even with her skin rotting. The mole is on the other side of her cheek now, in the picture, and the blond wig makes her look a little different, but look at those empty eye sockets, the eyes are near closed up just the same as the girl in the middle, and there's a little wrinkle in the eyelid that's on both the body with the Caroline label and the one with the Ronnie label.”

I grabbed the photograph and studied it.

“I look at a lot of photographs of dead bodies,” Booger said, “so I'm observant about that kind of thing. I got all these books with that stuff in them. It calms me.”

“Dead bodies?”

“Reminds me I'm not one of them. And another thing, there's a pattern.”

“What pattern?” I said.

“Two girls were killed the same way, and that's a pattern, and it means it may have been done before. So there could be an even bigger pattern. There could be some kind of records somewhere of this kind of shit. It might show a connection to the killer, or killers.”

“That's smart, Booger. It really is.”

“It is, isn't it? Another thing, there were those flyers about the preacher, Judence. He's talking at ten in the morning on the campus. Why would they put the flyers in there? Call me a high yellow?”

“Because it means something to them,” I said.

“They are telling you all the facts without stating them. They want to do it all like an onion skin, peeling a layer at a time. It's a game within a game, and there may be a game within that. Tabitha and…what was his name?”

“Ernie,” I said.

“They got in the middle of a plan, and so they became part of the plan and didn't know it. Caroline has to be alive and in on all of this, otherwise none of it fits. Those two dumb kids messed up the Geek and Caroline's plans for the DVDs, and they got snapped.”