Bad Thoughts

Chapter 33

Pig Dornich had tried calling Shannon from the Raleigh-Durham airport and again after he landed in Boston. He knew about Charlie Winters, about his release from prison four months before the murders started up again, and wanted to talk to Shannon before going to the police. But, and the magnitude of it left him overwhelmed, this was at least sixty murders over a twenty-year period. He tried his best to get ahold of him, but, well, Shannon would just have to hear it secondhand.

While he drove from Logan airport to his office in Malden he thought about the two cousins crisscrossing the country and about all the corpses they left behind. Twenty years ago they ended up in Sacramento. He pretty much guessed what happened with Shannon’s mother, that Charlie took a nap while Herbert did the murder. When he had gotten Charlie Winters’s arrest report faxed to him he knew why Winters had a thirteen-year-old boy in his trunk when the police had stopped him. He also knew why the recent murders were being done. In a way it was remarkable that things had worked out the way they had, almost as if the sonofabitch knew about Shannon’s blackouts. It was as if he knew when they happened, that he knew Shannon could be convinced he was doing the murders himself.

As Dornich pulled into the garage he heard over the radio about Elaine Horwitz. He recognized the name and remembered her as Shannon’s therapist. The report had her in critical condition. A grim determination tightened the flesh around his mouth. You’re losing your touch you goddamn psycho, he swore silently.

The adrenaline that had been pumping through him fizzled out. He felt tired all of a sudden. Weary to the bone. Looking in the rearview mirror he saw the eyes of an old man. If he had been a little smarter, a little quicker, a little more on the ball, that woman wouldn’t have been carved up. Charlie Winters would’ve been locked up already with the key thrown the hell away.

Dornich stopped outside his door. He smelled a rotting, rancid odor coming from his office. He wondered whether he had left any food out. As he opened the door the smell assaulted him. He realized rotting food couldn’t have caused that odor. Maybe if a raw sewage pipe had opened up into his office…

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned he felt something sharp ripping into his gut. His knees buckled and he fell to the floor. His hands felt a sticky wetness as they searched out the knife that had been buried in his stomach. Charlie Winters stood over him, grinning.

“The goddamn psycho hasn’t completely lost his touch, eh?” Winters asked.

Dornich didn’t answer him. His fingers lightly traced his wound. The knife had gone in below his belly and had been pushed up almost a foot, just about slicing him open.

“It’s almost as if I’ve been in your mind listening to your every thought, huh?” Winters asked, waiting patiently for an answer. When he didn’t get one he went on, “I wanted her alive when Billy Boy showed up. But, in any case, I don’t think she’ll be around much longer. Not the way I left her. Which was in a hell of a lot better shape than you’re in.”

Winters turned away from Dornich and started to collect the papers from his desk. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Winters asked as he dumped the faxes and reports detailing his and Herbie’s murders into a trash can. “You should’ve gone straight to the police, but I guess you wanted to waddle in with your evidence. What was it, you needed to show them how damn smart you are?” He lit the corner of one of the papers and watched as the fire spread and flared out of the trash can. A thick, black smoke poured into the room. After a while Winters flipped the can over.

“Ashes to ashes,” Winters noted.

Dornich moaned softly as the knife shifted inside him. Winters turned towards him, showing a slight melancholy smile. “I almost hate to tell you this,” he said, “but you didn’t even get a quarter of them. Herbie and I left a hell of a lot more corpses behind than what you found.”

Dornich tried to push himself up to his elbows, but fell back to the floor. Winters made a soft tsking noise. “Jesus,” he said, “look at you lying like that. Bleeding like a goddamn stuck pig.”

He stepped forward and aimed a kick at Dornich’s midsection. Dornich, though, caught his foot and pulled it towards him, sending Winters off balance and falling backwards. As he hit the floor, Dornich rolled on top of him, his heavy mass crushing Winters’s chest, his clenched fists hammering at his face. And then his hands were searching out Winters’s throat, his thick fingers closing around it, squeezing it.

Dornich came close to squeezing the life out of Charlie Winters and Winters knew it. His eyes bulged as they reflected the horror of that possibility. His tongue thickened as it pushed out of his slit-like mouth. He tried to scream. A strangled, gasping noise came out. Like a cat hacking on a hairball. The sound brought a slight smile to Dornich’s mouth.

Ultimately, though, it was a race, one which Pig Dornich just didn’t have enough time to win. The little life he had left dripped out with his blood and he collapsed lifeless on top of his killer.

Winters had to struggle to pry Dornich’s dead fingers from his throat and then to push his corpse off of him. As he lay on the floor gasping for air a horrible fury raged in his eyes. When he could move he turned to the dead man. By the time he left, Pig Dornich’s office looked worse than any slaughterhouse.