Authors: James W. Hall
The verbal altercation with the suspect concerned three issues. First, the worker who would soon become the victim of a murder casually noted to the drive-through customer that it was unusual for anyone to order a plain burger without cheese or any toppings whatsoever. The suspect objected to what he considered the worker’s haughty attitude. Further hostile interchange took place between the suspect and the victim, at which time the manager of the establishment came to her worker’s side and asked if there was a problem. The suspect made further antagonistic remarks to both manager and worker indicating he found the entire fast food industry to be guilty of abhorrent behavior regarding the manner in which chickens, cows, and pigs were raised. Following his final hostile remark, the suspect drove off with the three plain hamburgers.
Sugarman found Deputy Randolph at his desk drinking coffee and reading from his computer screen. He asked if Randolph could make him a copy of a couple of the photos. They might come in handy up the road.
Randolph made the copies and escorted Sugarman outside to his car.
“You nail this guy, you’ll let us know, right? Professional courtesy. I mean, this kid at the fast food place, Anthony Pope, he was a straight-A student at our county high school, track star, ran the mile, good hardworking kid with a single mom and three young sisters. Had a scholarship to go to Gainesville. Sang in the choir.” Randolph’s eyes were misty, his voice breaking on “choir.”
“I’ll let you know,” Sugarman said. “You have my word.”
Back on the interstate, holding it steady at ninety in the seventy zone, Sugar tugged the drive-through photo from the folder and had another look.
The guy had his hand outstretched from his car window and was about to take hold of the white paper sack from the attendant.
The man’s face was fleshy with small, moody eyes, a broad forehead, and a formidable hawk nose. Thick neck, big shoulders, the kind of goon you’d expect to see working as a bouncer in a biker bar.
One side of his upper lip was curled upward in a snarl that showed a glimpse of his right incisor. The expression seemed to sit easily on that mouth as if this was a man who scowled habitually. All in all, it was a harsh, resentful face, one that would be hard to love and seemed unlikely to express either affection or tenderness. His eyes were murky and lightless, possibly a result of the poor quality of the nighttime photo, or maybe that’s how the guy really looked, a pitiless and vacant stare.
Of course Sugarman knew he was projecting. He had no way of knowing if this man was ever tender or affectionate, loved or unloved. But he was pretty damn sure of one thing. Those three naked hamburger patties the man was holding in his right hand wound up choking to death a woman Sugarman had cared about a great deal.
TWENTY-NINE
AFTER THORN FLED, X-88 STUMBLED
out of the car, straightened his shoulders, probed his throbbing nose. Numb, but not flattened. He drew out the plugs to see if he could still smell and found that his nostrils were swollen but not completely clogged.
While Cruz sat in the front seat of the car and recovered, X stood beside her and made the case for returning to the farm. It was no use chasing the redhead without a fresh sample of her scent.
“Whatever it takes,” she said. “We can’t let her slip away.”
At the farm, Laurie and Pixie stayed with the car while Dobbins, with a hankie pressed to his bloody nose, followed X’s orders and went for Ziploc bags and brought them to the room where Cassandra was imprisoned.
X was standing next to the mound of red hair piled in a corner.
“Hers?” He kicked at the pile.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dobbins said. “Burkhart thought hacking it off would get her talking. It didn’t work. Nothing did.”
X-88 picked up a handful of hair, sniffed it, then stuffed it inside the bag and sealed it.
“You going to tell me what the hell you’re doing?” Dobbins was planted in the doorway. “These fuckers are absconding and you two’re playing games.”
X bent over and pressed his nose to the vinyl seat where Cassandra had been bound up. He looked back at Cruz and nodded, took out his pocketknife, and sliced a square of vinyl from the seat and tucked it in the other plastic bag.
“Colored town,” X said. “We’ll start there. Where Thorn was headed.”
X was getting in the car, Dobbins and Cruz already in their seats, when Pixie tapped him on the shoulder and motioned for him to follow.
When they’d moved a few yards away, she said, “I know what you’re thinking, X. You want to burn this place down, destroy it. It’s horrible, all these pigs in the cages, your worst nightmare, hell on earth. But I’m pleading with you, don’t do it, X. Please, as a favor to me.”
“Favor?”
“I know this is sudden, and I’m sorry, but I’m staying here.”
“Staying where?”
“I mean staying for good. She invited me and I said yes.”
Pixie cut a look toward Laurie, who was leaning against a tree nearby, smoking what looked like a joint.
“You and her? Hell, you just met the woman a few hours ago.”
“There was a day when I’d just met you, X. You were an impulse and that worked out pretty good.”
“I haven’t seen you say two words to her. I haven’t seen you and her even look at each other. Who the hell is she anyway?”
“You haven’t paid much attention to me lately.”
“You don’t even know that girl, Pixie.”
“You sound like my mother. Can you hear yourself?”
Yeah, he did. He sounded like fucking Cruz.
“I wouldn’t even consider it except when you tried to push me off on Varla in St. Augustine, then what you said about the train coming to the station, you meant that, didn’t you?”
“I meant it.”
“Soon?”
“Can’t say. But yeah, feels like it should be arriving shortly.”
“I’m sorry, X. I’m really sorry. You’re hurting, aren’t you? The headaches?”
X waved off her question.
“Your old lady isn’t going to like this.”
“Are you kidding? She doesn’t care. She’s never cared. She’ll be glad to get rid of me. I’m the sick and twisted daughter, an embarrassment.”
From the car Dobbins yelled at them to hurry the fuck up.
“Pixie living on a hog farm.” He said it, adjusting to the idea.
“So now you can’t burn this place down, X. I see it in your face, that’s what you were planning, some way or another blow it up, but you can’t. I’m staying here, and listen, I know it sounds crazy, but I was thinking maybe you could stay too.
“I had this idea, the three of us, we get rid of Dobbins. Laurie hates him, wants to be rid of him. It could be just the three of us, we could fix this place, make it right, put the pigs out to pasture or whatever, go natural, you don’t need to burn down everything just because it’s wrong the way it is.”
“So that’s what this is about? She’s angling for me to kill her brother?”
“No, it’s about fixing this place, making it right. What you believe in.”
“Let the pigs loose? Let them run free in the fields? Let them get old and die a natural death? You can’t make a living like that. It’s a fantasy, Pixie. That’s some silly-girl dream.”
“Stay, X. Don’t destroy it. Stay with me and Laurie. You’re always saying you want to fix things. Well, this is your chance. Fix this place, don’t tear it down.”
“It’s a fantasy.”
“We could make it happen,” Pixie said. “I know we could, the three of us could make it work. We’d throw in together, become a weird, fucked-up little family, find a way.”
“Okay, look,” he said. “For you, Pixie, just because it’s you, and because the promise I made to your dad, I won’t burn it down. But you got to know I can’t stay. This is everything I hate. This is the worst fucking place in the known universe. But hey, you’re welcome to it.”
He reached out and ruffled her white-blond hair, scratched his fingernails into her scalp the way she liked. She closed her eyes and went a little slack. After a few seconds more, X stopped and Pixie’s eyes came open.
Cruz shouted at them to hurry up.
“Goddamn it, I’ll miss you, X. You’re fucking unique. I’ll miss you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You probably will.”
X-88 left her standing there, got behind the wheel, and drove them the ten minutes through the Mexican slum and parked on the road on the outskirts of Belmont Heights. He felt bad. Maybe it was about losing Pixie, or maybe it was just his goddamn nose, swollen and sore from Thorn’s punches. If it hadn’t been for the plugs in his nostrils, his nose might’ve been smashed flat and pouring blood like Dobbins’s was.
They got out and he took a few quick sniffs of the air.
“We’re close,” X said, and led Cruz and Dobbins into Belmont Heights.
They wound in and out between houses. Children peeked from windows, and a pack of mongrels tagged along barking till X halted and glared their way and they scattered.
There was no sign of men anywhere.
He was carrying the three plastic Ziploc bags. The red hair, the vinyl swatch, and in the third was an orange T-shirt from a bar in Key Largo. Cruz picked it up on her first trip to Pine Haven, loot she’d found in the tree huggers’ van, the shirt was Flynn’s. A while ago X took a single snort of the T-shirt. Its scent was a blend of wet wood, caramel, vanilla tea, and toasted bread, sharp and distinctive though not nearly as zesty as Cassandra’s aroma.
Her mass of red hair was dense with odor.
Though it was a challenge to smell anything at all beneath the haze of pig shit blanketing the area, in that tangle of red hair he’d detected the nuttiness of marzipan, damp stones, a grassy pasture with a tinge of mint, and a background of cat piss and yeasty warm biscuit. All of which told him she’d been living outdoors, sleeping on pine needles, bathing in river water, using no deodorant or toothpaste for months, and she’d been engaged in unsanitary practices, employing neither soap or toilet paper. Her hair was sour and greasy, flecked with fecal matter.
A unique flavor, but still hard to track because molecules of those same odors were floating everywhere in this neighborhood. If he’d had to rely solely on this bag of hair, X might easily blunder around for a week without finding her, drawn to an empty field where moist rocks lay hidden in a bed of pennyroyal, or attracted to a house filled with cats where someone was cooking cornbread. He could bat from smell to smell and never locate that particular blend of fragrances in one place.
However, once he was in close proximity to Cassandra, he knew her scent would guide him the last few steps, but at such a distance, the collection of aromas in her hair didn’t point anywhere in particular.
Fortunately he didn’t have to rely on her hair alone. There was another scent available, her aromatic signature, a pungent strand of her bodily odor that was as distinct as a ten-carat diamond in a box of river rocks.
“Can you do it?” Cruz said. “Or do we call for the bloodhounds?”
“Fuck the dogs,” X said. “She’s been through here in the last hour.”
“You’re shitting me,” Dobbins said. “He’s pretending he can smell her trail?”
Cruz said, “X-88 is a fragrance savant. Better than any dog.”
“Give me a fucking break. This freak?”
X spun on Dobbins, gripped a handful of his hair, and yanked his head backward, locked him in place with an arm around his throat. He spoke quietly into his right ear.
“I’m going to give you a free science lesson, redneck, so pay attention, I’ll go slow. My olfactory receptor neurons are as sensitive as a beagle’s. You, if you’re lucky, you got five million receptors, where I’m at something north of two hundred million. Which means, even on a bad day, I can tell whether or not there’s a single drop of human piss in an Olympic swimming pool.
“But that’s just the start. Because those neurons send messages to my olfactory bulb and it ships those signals to three places at once, the frontal cortex where odors are perceived, the hypothalamus amygdala where the emotional shit is stored, and to the hippocampus that handles odor memory.
“Normal-size hypothalamus, it’s an almond. Mine’s a lemon. Regular hippocampus is shaped like a seahorse. Supposed to be about an inch long. Mine’s triple that. I’ve been lab tested, X-rayed, and CAT scanned half a dozen times. Reason I had all those tests, it’s because my lemon and my seahorse, they started out big, but this last year, they started growing. They’re double the size they used to be, and they’re still growing. If they don’t stop, in a month or two, maybe less, my skull’s going to crack wide open. So yeah, damn right I’m a freak of nature, but I’m the exact freak you people need at this moment.
“There it is, hotshot. You don’t believe it, think I’m a joke, a fake, whatever, fine, stand back and watch, then decide if I’m for real. But I’m not taking any more of your bullshit. You got it?”
Dobbins made a throaty noise that sounded like agreement. X released him, pushed him away, and kept walking through the warren of houses.
It took a few more minutes before the scent trail led him to a two-story shack. The shack was neater and larger than those around it, with flower boxes, a gleaming tin roof, a fresh coat of white paint.
X-88 tilted his head back, shut his mouth, and inhaled deeply, and inhaled again. He smiled at Cruz.
“You got something?”
“Blood’s a bitch,” he said. “Nails you every time.”
“What’s that mean? Cassandra’s wounded? She’s bleeding?”
X-88 held up the Ziploc bag with the vinyl inside.
“Having her period,” X said. “Squirming on that chair, her blood and sweat soaked in pretty good. Normally vaginas are acidic, and that keeps germs at bay, but blood changes the pH and kick-starts bacteria. At the moment our girl’s got some very nutritious organisms thriving in her crotch.”
“Where is she?”
“She was here a while ago, maybe an hour, I don’t know, maybe less.”
“Which way?”
“Slow down,” he said. “I need another whiff of the T-shirt.”
“They’re together? Cassandra and Flynn?”
“A hit of this, I’ll know for sure.”
He peeled open the plastic bag, drew in a deep breath, then closed it up again. Turned in a half circle, breathing evenly.