"Whoever he is, he never has to worry about child support."
"What do you mean?"
Erno shook his little snack. "There are more corn nuts in this bag than sperm in his, if you catch my meaning."
Bud did and immediately wished he didn't. "Can you tell me the time of death?"
"No."
"Can't you take a guess?"
Erno tore open the bag of nuts and spilled a few into his hand. "A few months ago, a couple of hikers in Spain found a guy frozen in a block of ice. They called the police. Turns out the guy had been missing for a while. A couple thousand years, in fact. Maybe it was more like a hundred thousand. I don't know. The point is, they wouldn't have known how long ago he froze to death if wasn't for certain evolutionary changes, and the clothes and tools they found near him. Since we haven't evolved much since Lissy Masters died, and we had a pretty warm summer, I'd say she died sometime this winter."
Erno popped the nuts in his mouth and crunched on them, using the loud crack they made to punctuate his point.
Bud thought for a long moment and decided to ask Erno to do him a big favor before sending the autopsy to the Chief.
* * * * * *
It took the security guards fifteen minutes to respond to the break-in, hardly the instant, armed response promised on the sign in the front lawn. But Bud Flanek was thankful for the extra time, it gave him a chance to find the freezer in the basement and a comfortable chair to sit in.
The two rent-a-cops appeared in the open door way at the top of the stairs striking dramatic poses they learned from TV. One stretched his arm straight out, twisting his wrist so his gun was aimed sideways, a grip that looked cool, but was about as useful as trying to shoot the weapon with his foot. The other security guard held his gun straight up, right in front of his face, a stance that might be effective if his target happened to be levitating directly over his head.
"You guys ever fire those guns, you're gonna hurt yourselves worse than the person you're trying to shoot, so why don't you put them away?" Bud sat at the bottom of the stairs in a folding chair, one arm resting on top of the padlocked freezer, the other holding up his badge to Crockett and Tubbs.
"Bud Flanek, Homicide."
"Where's the perp?" Tubbs asked, reluctantly holstering his gun.
"In the time it took you to get here, he could almost be at the airport. In another five minutes, he could be on a plane to Jakarta," Bud said. "But as luck would have it, the perpetrator is right here."
"He's in the freezer?" Crockett asked.
"No," Bud replied. "He's sitting in this chair, putting his badge back in his pocket."
"You broke into the house?" Tubbs asked. It was more of a statement than a question. Bud nodded. "I assume you've got a search warrant you can show us."
"I couldn't get one, even if I'd tried, which I didn't, because whether I have a warrant or not isn't going to matter," Bud glanced at his watch. "What I really need is for the two of you to wait here with me for a while."
"Wait for what?" Crockett asked suspiciously.
"Assistance in a homicide investigation. Did your dispatcher notify the homeowner that there'd been a break in?"
"Yeah," Crockett replied.
"Then it shouldn't be much longer," Bud motioned to some folding chairs propped against the wall. "Take a seat, relax. You might learn a few things."
The two rent-a-cops shared a confused look, then went over and took some seats, unfolded them, and sat down.
Bud glanced at his watch again and felt the two guys staring at him. "So, you guys ever try to join the police department?"
"I didn't meet the height requirement," Tubbs groused. "Or the weight."
"And you?" Bud asked Crockett.
"The department doesn't recognize the high school equivalency exam certificate of completion as a valid diploma," Crockett explained bitterly. "It's jealousy, that's what it is. Anybody with half-a-brain can see that someone who graduates early is smarter than someone who takes four years to learn the same stuff, right? So rather than have any intellectuals around who'd make them look stupid, they don't let us in."
"Sounds like you've both got legitimate grievances. You ought to take it up with the Chief of Police," Bud motioned to the stairs. "What do you say, Chief?"
Crockett and Tubbs looked up and were stunned to see Police Chief Fred Masters standing at the top of the stairs, his face rigid with anger and contempt. The two security guards turned to Bud in shock, but his gaze was on the Chief, who came slowly down the stairs.
"What the hell is going on here, Flanek?"
Bud knocked on the freezer. "The three of us were just sitting here wondering why you keep your freezer padlocked. Do a lot of frozen dinners get stolen in this neighborhood?"
"You broke into the police chief's house?" Tubbs stared at Bud. "Are you crazy?"
"No, I just haven't had sex in two years."
"Two years?" Crockett repeated incredulously.
"And when it's been that long you don't forget the last time," Bud looked back at the Chief. "It was the night your wife disappeared."
"I don't know what your problem is, and I don't care. You're fired. Surrender your gun and your badge, now." The Chief thrust out his hand for them, but Bud didn't move.
"Lissy made one of her naked, late-night trips to McDonalds and I got the call. We shared some fries and I offered to take her home. I was driving her back when she climbed in my lap and started kissing me. I had to pull over or crash. Once the car stopped, I was a goner, she had me. I knew Lissy was doing it to embarrass you, to get your attention, just like everything else she did. But she was beautiful, and she was naked, and she wanted me. I couldn't help myself."
The Chief lifted Bud out of his seat and threw him against the cement wall, knocking the air out of him. As Bud slid to the floor, the Chief pulled out his gun and jammed it against the detective's forehead.
"You miserable excuse for a man. I ought to shoot you right now."
Bud grimaced, trying to catch his breath as he spoke. "Then it's a good thing I invited witnesses."
The Chief looked over his shoulder, suddenly remembering the two security guards, who sat dumbfounded in their seats, their eyes wide and unblinking. He backed a few steps away from Bud, holstered his gun and regarded him with disgust. "You're finished. I'll see you go to prison for this."
Bud rose awkwardly to his feet, bracing his back against the wall for support. "What happened that night? She have a few drinks and fall asleep? How long did you wait before you locked her in the freezer and let her die?"
The Chief spun around, driving his fist deep into Bud's stomach. Bud doubled over and dropped to his knees, coughing up blood. The Chief turned back to the guards.
"Get him out of here," he told them. "I'll have officers here in five minutes to arrest him."
The Chief started back up the stairs. The guards moved like sleepwalkers, trudging over to Bud and lifting him to his feet. They'd never had a call anything like this before.
"You know why my wife left me?" Bud sputtered, barely able to speak. "I make $37,000 a year and I'm infertile."
The Chief froze on the stairs.
"That's how I knew Lissy didn't die last night, last week, or even last year. That's how I know she's been in this freezer with your fish sticks and meat pies."
The Chief slowly turned around, his gun in his hand again and aimed in Bud's general direction.
"She was an embarrassment to you. There was no way you'd ever become the Police Chief with her around," Bud spit out more blood and wiped his mouth with his wrist. "So you made her disappear again, only this time for good."
The Chief came down the stairs. Crockett and Tubbs dropped Bud on his knees and moved away from him.
"Once you were Chief, and enough time had passed, you dumped her in the park. You knew it wouldn't be possible for the coroner to determine when she actually froze to death. You should have gotten away with it."
"I still could." The Chief walked behind Bud and aimed his gun at the back of his head. "What's to stop me from executing you, shooting those two, and saying the intruder did it?"
"The blood sample I left with the coroner. He's already having a DNA comparison done between it and the semen sample. It's going to match, whether I live or die tonight."
The Chief raised his gun and stepped back from Bud. "When did you get so smart, Flanek?"
"I'm not smart," Bud replied. "Just unlucky."
"Not half as much as me," And with that, The Chief put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the gunshot reverberated off the cellar walls like a bomb blast, jolting the two security guards off their feet and knocking Bud face-first onto the floor.
After a moment, the shot still ringing in his ears, Bud sat up and looked at the two guards, who staggered to their feet, their faces ashen.
"So," Bud said, spitting out another gob of blood, "either of you guys have any job applications on you?"
THE END
The voice of a new generation sat at the end of aisle 14, where the house wares department ended and the book section began. He peered over the neat stack of paperbacks on the table in front of him and, once again, as politely as he could, told the irritable woman in the orange tank top and slouchy breasts that he had absolutely no idea where she could find wart remover.
"You're not being much of a help," she snapped, leaning one hand on her shopping cart, which was filled with disposable diapers, Weight Watchers Frozen Dinners, Captain Crunch, a sack of dry dog food, a box of snail poison and three rolls of paper towel. "Look at this, it's doubled in size just this week."
She thrust a finger in his face, making sure he got a good look at the huge wart on her knuckle.
"I don't work here," he replied.
"Then what are you doing sitting at a help desk?"
"This isn't a help desk. I'm an author," he said. "I'm autographing my book."
She seemed to notice the books for the first time and picked one up. "What's it about?"
He hated that question. That's what book covers were for.
"It's about an insomniac student who volunteers for a sleep study and falls into an erotic relationship with a female researcher that leads to murder."
"Are there cats in it?" she asked, flipping through the pages.
"Why would there be a cat in it?"
"Because cats make great characters," she dropped his book back on the stack, dismissing it and him with that one economical gesture. "Don't you read books?"
"I do," he replied. "I must have missed the ones with cats."
"I like cat books, especially the ones where they solve murders. If you're smart, you'll write a cat book." And with that, she adjusted her bra strap and rolled away in search of a potion to eradicate her warts.
The way things were going, maybe a cat book was the way to go. Things certainly couldn't get any worse than they already were.
He was wrong about that.
"Attention K-Mart shoppers," blared a shaky voice over the loudspeakers. "We're pleased to welcome best-selling author Kevin Dangler, the voice of a new generation, who is signing his latest book,
Twisted Sheets
, on aisle 14. Be sure to stop by and say hello, and on your way, don't forget to visit our garden center, where a flat of spring color is only $9.99."
He laid his head down on his arms and cursed God for his cruelty. One day, you're signing books in New York alongside Elmore Leonard and Sue Grafton for hundreds of adoring readers, and the next, you're sitting in a K-Mart in Spokane, competing for attention against a tray of bargain begonias and losing.
It was hardly the future he envisioned when his first novel,
Frost Bite,
burst on the literary scene five years ago with a starred review in Publishers Weekly declaring him "the reincarnation of James M. Cain at the peak of his literary powers." A front-page rave from The New York Times Book Review anointed him "the voice of a new generation."
His wife Janine, who had supported them both for years as a legal secretary, abruptly quit her job, flushed her birth control pills down the toilet, and demanded immediate impregnation. Giddy with success, Kevin enthusiastically complied.
Frost Bite
landed on the New York Times bestseller list for a week, just long enough to sell the paperback rights for six figures and justify calling himself a best-selling author for the rest of his life.
One year, five hardcover printings, one new house, two BMWs and one colicky baby girl later, his second novel came out. Personally, Kevin thought
Do Unto Others
was his best work, an opinion not shared by Publisher's Weekly, which called "the phone book a thriller by comparison." Kirkus Reviews lambasted it as "478 page suicide note for a once-promising writing career." Entertainment Weekly wondered if the author had "undergone a previously undisclosed lobotomy after finishing his last book." The New York Times ignored it altogether.
It surprised nobody but Kevin when
Do Unto Others
tanked, remaindered to $1.99 oblivion in just six weeks. He was immediately written off as a one-hit wonder.
Kevin set out to prove them wrong and started writing a new novel. In the meantime, his enthusiastic spending caught up with him, forcing him to downsize. He traded the house for an apartment and the Beemers for Daewoos, assuring his furious wife he'd buy it all back with the big money from his third book.
But his publisher rejected
Twisted Sheets
, and so did seven others. His wife decided it was time that the voice of a new generation went to work in her father's shoe store.
Frantic, Kevin finally sold his book for $7500 to a paperback house best known for churning out an endless series of occult romances by an author who died twenty years ago.
The instant
Twisted Sheets
came out, Kevin fled in his Daewoo on a self-arranged book tour. He partly financed his cross-country trek by selling autographed, fifth editions of
Frost Bite
, which he bought for a buck and, when he could, sold out of his trunk for $20.
For the last two months, he'd been signing anywhere and any place, desperate to spark word-of-mouth, willing to do anything but have to return to his nagging wife and wailing kid and the nightmarish prospect of selling Florsheims for the rest of his life.
"I can't believe you're here," a woman said softly, almost whispering.
"Neither can I," he replied, his face still on the table.
Kevin wearily lifted his head and saw a woman in her early 20s, dressed casually in white sweat pants and a tight-fitting, sleeveless t-shirt, the words READ BETWEEN THE LINES emblazoned across her boyish chest. Her short, blond hair was tussled in that just-got-out-of-bed way, which made him think of her in bed and all the things she might have done to tussle her hair.
Kevin started to perspire. She handed him a copy of
Frost Bite,
the book jacket carefully protected in a clear, plastic cover. "Would you sign this for me?"
She
brought
a book with her. That meant she actually came here specifically to see him. To a K-mart. This could be the turning point. A small sign from God that things were starting to go his way.
"Of course," he eagerly snatched the book from her and opened it to the title page. It was a first edition. She must have had it for years. At last, a fan. They were finally coming out of hibernation.
"Who should I make it out to?" he asked.
"To Megan."
As an afterthought, she picked up one of the paperbacks and set it in front of him. "And this one, too, please."
"My pleasure." And, he could have said, a tremendous relief. In fact, that's almost what he inscribed in her copy of
Frost Bite.
Instead he wrote:
To Megan, who reminded me why I became a writer.
"I've wanted to meet you for so long. I think you're the greatest writer," she bounced nervously, watching him sign her book. "This is kind of embarrassing for me to admit, but it's the sexiest book I've ever read."
Kevin looked up at her again, her unfettered bosom directly in front of his eyes. Self-conscious, he quickly shifted his gaze to her face. She was blushing.
"I'm very flattered," he said, leaving out the fact that he was also very excited.
"I really mean it. I used to make my ex-boyfriend read it to me before we made love," she said, a little breathlessly. "I think that was one of the reasons we split up. That, and he doesn't like books."
"All books, or just mine?" he closed
Frost Bite,
admiring again the careful way she'd folded the plastic cover over the jacket, and opened the paperback to inscribe it.
"I'm a librarian. I also collect signed, first edition mysteries. I have hundreds of them," she replied. "But there's only one I keep beside my bed."
He cleared his throat and glanced up at her chest again. A bead of sweat rolled down his back. She was the most attractive librarian he'd ever seen. "It must be a very impressive collection."
"Would you like to see it?" she asked tentatively.
Kevin looked back down at the paperback, as if hesitating over what to sign instead of fantasizing about what a peek at her collection could lead to.
He was hundreds of miles from home. His wife would never know. And didn't he deserve just a little appreciation after all the humiliation he'd endured?
Kevin smiled. "I'll finish up here and meet you in the parking lot in ten minutes."
* * * * * *
It was a 102 outside, so Kevin cranked up the Daewoo's air conditioner, the occasional puffs of lukewarm air it produced straining the four cylinder engine so much, he had a hard time keeping up with Megan at thirty miles per hour.
He followed her pristine, '91 Cutlass through Spokane, where KFC was still called Kentucky Fried Chicken, every other car seemed to be an old Ford pick-up with a camper lid and everybody he saw had a Budweiser cap.
His readers weren't here. They were hanging out in funky coffee houses or laying on the beach in Hawaii or recovering from plastic surgery or jetting across the Atlantic in business class. They weren't eating at Arby's and living in motor homes.
All the more proof that Megan was a sign. No, a miracle. She was the fishing boat that spotted your life raft just before you were going to eat the other survivors.
Megan led him to a tiny, ranch-style home in a forty year old housing tract, the decaying rubble of the baby boom. She rolled her Cutlass into the carport and hurried to the front door. He pulled up to the curb and when he got out, she was already inside the house, holding the screen door open for him.
"Come on in," she said enthusiastically. "I'll get you a beer."
As long as you don't bring me the hat to go with it, he thought. "That would be nice."
She stepped aside to let him through, forcing him to squeeze past her to get inside, his body brushing hers so closely, he could feel the heat off her skin.
He was still enjoying the sensation when he got his first look at her place. It was like stepping into a small town library. The walls were lined, from floor to ceiling and around the windows, with those white Ikea screw-and-glue bookcases, each shelf containing an orderly row of hardcovers, all protected in clear, plastic jackets. He wondered if she had a her own card catalog to go with it.
A leather couch, a recliner, and a coffee table were crammed closely together in what little space remained in the room. Comfort seemed secondary to collecting books.
"It probably seems crummy compared to your mansion," she said apologetically, heading for the kitchen.
"There's no place nicer than a room full of books."
Why ruin it for her? She didn't have to know he was living in a two bedroom apartment with one bath.
Kevin made a slow circle of the room, cocking his head to one side to read the titles on the shelves. She had books from all the biggest names in mysteries, from Block to Westlake. They couldn't all be signed.
He pulled a book out at random.
Blood Work.
It was a first edition.
To Megan, this one is from the heart. Michael Connelly.
He grabbed another.
Get Shorty.
First edition, signed by Elmore Leonard.
To Megan, with appreciation.
Wow.
Kevin put the book back just as Megan came out of the kitchen, a cold bottle of Bud in each hand.
"This is an amazing collection," he took the bottle she offered him.
"I'm into books." She sat across from him on the arm of the couch.
"No kidding. I had no idea so many authors signed in Spokane."
"They don't," she grinned mischievously. "I have to chase them down."
"Really?" he grinned back, taking a drink.
"I go to all the big mystery conventions and stand in a lot of lines," she said. "But it's worth it to just to meet the authors."
"Why?"
"Because they've let me see what they see, feel what they feel, dream what they dream. You can't get more intimate than that. I want them to know who've they've touched and, if I can, touch them back."
Megan took a swallow of beer, tilting her head back. She had a wonderful neck, long and slender, and she caught him looking it. She smiled. "This is unreal, you standing here in my house."
"It's probably even more exciting for me."
"I don't know how that can be. I mean, who am I?"
Kevin knew exactly what to say. She'd practically given him the words herself. He set down his beer on a shelf and took a step towards her.
"The warm breath on my neck when I feel the most alone, the gentle caress along my arm when I think I'm lost. The presence I've always felt standing just behind me when I write," he said softly. "I always thought it was just my imagination. Now I know it's not. Now I know that all this time, it was you."
It was such a load of crap. It was all he could do to say it without laughing. But he could see that it was working, a slow flush creeping across her face. Megan rose from the couch and took his hand.
"Let me show you where I keep your book," she said huskily.
Megan led him down a short hallway to the bedroom. There were bookcases on every wall there, too, with barely enough room for a full-size bed and a nightstand, her copy of
Frost Bite
already in place. He wondered how she got it back there so fast.
She let go of his hand, slowly lifted her shirt over her head and fell back on the bed.
"Read to me," she whispered.
* * * * * *
He'd never done so much for so long and so many times. It was eight hours of carnal calisthenics. And now, well into the night, he lay on her bed, his skin sticky with sweat and saliva, feeling as empty and as fulfilled as he'd ever been.
She crawled to the end of the bed and stood up.