Bad Men

Shepherd nodded in satisfaction. “Good. I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. I’d like to know where your boyfriend is.”

She didn’t reply.

“Your boyfriend,” he repeated. “Verso. Or have you forgotten him already?”

“I haven’t heard from him.”

Shepherd sighed. His hand moved in a blur of flesh and metal, drawing a red line from her left shoulder to the top of her right breast. She started to yelp and he again covered her mouth with his hand.

“I told you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you make me. I will ask you again: where is he?”

“The police have him.”

“The police where?”

“In Virginia.”

“Where in Virginia?”

“I don’t know.”

Shepherd raised the blade again and she said, louder this time: “I don’t know. They keep moving him. He’s not my boyfriend anymore. I haven’t seen him since he turned himself in. All I know is that he’s going to be in Norfolk soon. There’s a grand-jury hearing. He’s going to testify.”

“When was the last time he called?”

She was silent for a time.

“There’s a limit to my patience,” he warned her.

“This morning,” she said at last.

“Before or after I called?”

“After. I was just on my way out the door when the phone rang.”

The phone lay on a table to Shepherd’s left. There was an answering machine hooked up to it, but it was turned off.

“Why is your machine off?”

“I was going to go out tonight, catch a movie. You were my only appointment.”

“Stand up,” said Shepherd.

She did as she was told. He walked her to the phone table, then told her to kneel, facing away from him.

“Please!” she said.

“Just kneel. I want to star sixty-nine your phone, and I don’t want you doing anything stupid while I dial.”

Reluctantly, she knelt. Shepherd pressed the buttons, then listened.

“Chesapeake Inn and Suites,” said a male voice. Shepherd hung up.

Asshole, he thought.

He stepped back from the kneeling woman. She didn’t turn around.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

“I won’t,” said Shepherd.

He was a man of his word. She didn’t feel a thing.

Harry Rylance had never thought of himself as the nervous type. Nobody ever made a good living out of the insurance business by being nervous. Nervousness was for the suckers who bought the policies. The whole business was predicated on fear. Without it, the insurance industry would sink like a stone and Harry would sink along with it, but Harry had to admit that he was feeling pretty damn nervous now. The creepy retard kid had disappeared and Harry’s instinct was to get the hell out of the house and hope that he and Veronica could find their own route back to the highway.

Except the house smelled of dead meat, and there were flies buzzing.

And curiosity was a terrible thing.

Harry padded softly across the floor of the living room, wincing every time a board creaked. In the kitchen, he found a pile of take-out chicken buckets littered with the stripped bones of those midget chickens the fast-food companies raised on some irradiated Pacific atoll; no other way, thought Harry, that you got legs and wings that small. A frying pan stood on the range, pieces of burnt fat adhering to its base, and bugs floated on the surface of the foul-smelling stew that sat in a pot beside it. There was an ancient refrigerator beside the stove, humming and rattling like a crazy old man in a tin cage. Harry reached out to open it, then paused. He could see himself reflected in the metal, his features distorted. Something white was behind him.

Harry spun around and lashed out at the drapes that in the still air, hung unmoving over the window. A plate fell from the drain board and shattered on the floor, sending ants scurrying in confusion. Somewhere, a cockroach clicked.

“Shit,” said Harry, and opened the fridge door.

Apart from a carton of week-old milk, it was empty.

In the freezer compartment, Harry found meat packed in bags. There was a lot of it.

He closed the fridge doors, then went back into the living room. No sounds came from upstairs.

“Hello?” called Harry. “Kid, you okay up there?”

He began to climb and, for the first time, he heard it: two words of a song, repeated over and over, the needle caught in the groove of the record.

– don’t care

– don’t care

– don’t care

Elvis, thought Harry. The King don’t care.

He reached the top of the steps. There was a bedroom before him, but it was empty, the sheets on the bed thrown back where its occupant had departed, leaving it unmade. Beside it was a bathroom, judging by the tiles on the floor, but it stank so bad that Harry’s eyes began to water. The door was almost closed. Harry nudged it with his foot, and it opened slowly.

There was a man sitting on the toilet. His pants were around his ankles, and a newspaper dangled from his hand. Instinctively, Harry started to apologize.

“Shit, sorr-”

Harry stepped back and covered his mouth with his hand, but it was too late. He felt the fluid on his fingers, then bent down to finish puking.