Leather Maiden

42

We put Gregore in the car and drove on out toward the scenic overlook. As we went along, me at the wheel, Gregore weak and bloody beside me, Booger leaned over the seat and pressed the .45 against Gregore’s head.

“Man,” said Booger, “you’re not looking so good.”

“I’m not feeling so good,” Gregore said. “You didn’t have to hit me so much.”

“Hell,” said Booger, “I know that.”

“I’m still thirsty,” Gregore said.

“People in hell want ice water too,” Booger said.

I thought about everything Gregore had said. I understood a lot of it now. Mostly I understood Stitch was playing Dinkins through Caroline, and he was playing the black and white communities like a finely tuned instrument.

He had done the same sort of thing in other towns, playing his games, all of them ending in an assassination that didn’t seem connected to other events and oddities. It was all a happy game to Stitch.

As for Caroline, once upon a time Stitch had been her mother’s lover, and then he had been hers. He had impregnated her, then gone away. Caroline had dumped their love child, and then, in time, Stitch came back. He was full of promises, rich with lies about love and how he wanted her and needed her back.

Caroline wanted to believe, and so she had. He was probably the only person in the world she would believe. I bet he was the one who had given her the Fitzgerald book when she was a child. Maybe he had read the Poe stories to her, including her favorite, “The Premature Burial.”

The whole goddamn thing creeped me, big-time.

I remembered a line I had read from Jerzy Fitzgerald’s book. He said life was full of holes and the trick was to live between them. Stitch was not living between them. He was living in them, and loving it.

We came to the top of the hill and I parked in front of a lightning-struck oak that had split down the middle almost to the ground. The tree was still alive and the split was wide and made a large V of darkness, and from that height the moon seemed wedged there in the fork. I turned off the lights and the motor. We got out of the car. Gregore could hardly stand up. He looked as if he had lost ten pounds and an inch in height.

Booger gave him a kick in the ass, said, “Go up there and stand by that tree, limp dick.”

Gregore trudged up the hill like Jesus carrying the cross up Calvary. When Gregore got up there, he stood in the fork of the lightning-struck tree. He put one hand on half of the tree to right himself. The moon was at his back like a spotlight. He was a silhouette up there.

“You said you’d let me go,” Gregore said. His voice sounded hollow, floated down from the top of the hill like a dead leaf falling from a tree.

“We’re going to leave you here,” I said. “I advise you not to come back to town. You stay out of this mess. Be done. You deserve worse than what we’re giving you.”

“Doesn’t everybody?” he said.

“Not everybody,” Booger said. “Some are just unlucky. They get nominated for the big ticket. Right now, I’m punching yours.”

By the time I realized what Booger meant, the .45 went up and the sound of it going off was like a mortar shot. Gregore’s head split and something jumped out of it and landed wetly in the grass and he went down, falling backward into the fork in the tree. He hung there for a moment and then his head went back and his body flipped after him. All that was left was his shoe hung up in the fork. I could hear him tumbling down the hill in the grass on the other side, and then I didn’t hear anything but the ringing in my ear from the blast of the .45.

“Goddamn, Booger. Why, man?”

“Don’t be silly,” Booger said. “You think he was just going to hitchhike to Lufkin, catch a bus to Vegas? He’d have been back in the game in no time. He might have warned that other guy, Numb Nuts…whatever his name is.”

“Jesus, Booger.”

“No one heard that shot. Not out here. And like all my guns, it’s a cold piece. You couldn’t trace this gun if you were Sherlock Holmes. Any of my weapons. There’s no record. Shit, I pretty much made some of them. Give me a pipe and a wrench and a cutting torch, I can make something that will shoot like a sniper rifle.”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

“Sure it was. Someone finds him, even they know who he is, who’s gonna miss him? Anybody that would deserves to be miserable. He was just as much a part of all of this as they were. You’re gonna do this thing, you can’t be fucking around and letting shits like him go and depend on them to be on the honor system. Once you wipe your ass on them, you flush them. And I got one other thing. He ain’t gonna get up. Let’s go on back to town and get that girl of yours before the mosquitoes eat me up. I done got a good bite on the back of my neck.”

I drove us back. I sat silent. I had had my fill of death. That damn shoe hung up in the fork of that lightning-struck oak would be in my head forever.

Booger turned on the radio, began tapping his fingers to a song. I wondered what he was thinking about. I wondered if he was thinking about anything.

As I topped another hill and sailed around a curve, a fog settled on us and I had to go slow and lean forward to see. After a while the fog faded and the lights of Camp Rapture sprang up in front of us like Brigadoon rising from the mist. The tower on campus had a warm, gold light behind the face of the clock. All the little half-moon windows that ran up the front of the clock were lit up too, including the little half-moon above the face of the clock. The clock stood two stories above the building that housed the history department, and the windows there were dark. All around the tower there was darkness, and then there were lights way out from the tower, and they were the lights of the town. We came down from the heights of the hills and leveled out and cruised on into Camp Rapture. By then, the moon was a lost dream in the rearview mirror.

I wanted to go to the campus right away, but Booger didn’t like that idea.

“You’re so goddamn tired you’re trembling,” he said. “Me too. I wouldn’t mind something to eat, a bathroom break.”

“We’re not on vacation,” I said.

“No, but we’re serious, and we got time if what Gregore told us is true. We need a little rest. We can’t be off the beam.”

“And what if Gregore is wrong?”

“He could have been wrong yesterday, bro. Know what I’m saying?”

I did. Belinda could already be dead. What Gregore told us could have been lies.

We drove to my place, and when we got there I took a shower and put on fresh clothes and got Ernie’s backpack out of the hiding place in my closet. I took the DVDs out and put them back in the hole, and I took a couple of books from my shelf and put them in the pack; I might look a little old for a student, but they come in all ages, so I thought I could pull it off if someone stopped me.

Booger was on the couch and he had taken his duffel bag from the car and had it open. In it was a long black barrel, a wooden knob for a stock, a trigger and a long telescopic sight and a silencer, a few other odds and ends. He put this stuff together quickly, screwed the bolts down with the edge of a coin, had a rifle with a silencer and a scope within instants.

He said, “When this thing goes off, it’ll sound softer than a mouse farting with a cork up its ass. Unless you’re the one firing it, you won’t hear a thing.”

“You just go around with a rifle in a duffel bag?” I said.

“You know me, I got all manner of shit in here, and nearly all of it says Bang. A few things, they cut. I get away from guns and knives, I start to feel like I’ve lost my friends, ’cause this stuff, you and Runt, are about it in the friend department.”

“This friend good for what we need to do?”

“He’s the goddamn ticket, bro. Made this dude,” he said, holding up the rifle. “Shoots one shot, .22 slug.”

“One shot?” I said.

“You’re me, you don’t need but one. We get in that tower, those little windows, there’s bound to be some way to get to them. They got to clean that shit somehow. I can position myself at one of them and aim across at the building where Stitch is gonna show to shoot. I give him one in the eye, he’s done.”

“What if you don’t hit the eye?” I said.

“Hell, you’re asking something you know the answer to. He’s still dead. But you know me, I can shoot the tip off a mosquito’s dick if you can point it out.”

“What about the glass in the window?”

“Let me worry about that.”

I took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen and stood at the window over the sink and watched the light of morning bleed into the darkness and melt it. I got a bottled coffee out of the fridge for me, a beer for Booger, his usual breakfast. When I got back to the living room area, he had already taken the gun apart and put it back in the duffel bag.

“It’ll come together smooth,” he said. He took a folding knife from the bag, held it up. “Take this. I got one.”

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“Take it anyway.” He tossed it to me and I slipped it into my front pocket.

“And put this in your pack,” he said, bending over the bag like some kind of malignant Santa. He came up with a .38 automatic. He screwed a silencer on it. He tossed it to me. I caught it, made to toss it back at him.

“I got a gun,” I said.

“Not a clean one. Get through with this one, wipe it down and toss it. It’s a good shooter but it’s expendable. Leave your .38 here.”

I took the automatic and didn’t put it in the bag. I thought if I got stopped, that bag and those books were a way of maybe convincing someone I was a student. The .38 might be a little hard to explain. I put it under my shirt, stuck it in my pants. It lay cool against the small of my back.

Booger took a shower and came back and drank another beer, crushed the can and dropped it on my coffee table. I gave him a look and he grinned at me and picked it up and took it into the kitchen and put it in the trash under the sink. When he came back he said, “Sorry, I was raised bad.”

“Should we go?” I said.

Booger looked at his watch, shook his head. “On campus too early, we’ll be suspicious. Campus cops might come down on us. We’ll make our way to the tower and I’ll do the lock magic. We’ll be in before anyone knows it, before the speech starts.”

“Cutting it close,” I said.

“If we cut it early, we’re more likely to get caught.”

“They’ll be watching for shit when Judence is there. They’ll be expecting shit.”

“We’ll come up behind the clock tower. Like Dickweed said, the cops here are yokels.”

I thought about the chief of police. I couldn’t argue that.

“Still,” I said, “they might post guards.”

“They do, and they’re any good, they’ll catch Caroline before we do. They do, then we got no worries, bro.”

Booger could see I wasn’t taking this well. That I wanted to go. Now.

“We get seen too early by the cops,” he said, “we’re screwed, doo-dooed and tattooed, especially carrying heat. We get spotted too early by Stitch or Caroline, we’re screwed. Everyone has to be busy. The cops and our dynamic duo. Stitch and the bitch, they got to be in their zone so they don’t expect us.”

“Makes sense,” I said, but I didn’t like it.

Booger, who had been standing, sipping beer, sat down on the couch and closed his eyes, and within minutes he was asleep.