Silent Terror

16

January 4, 1979.

I was driving north on U.S. 5 in a snowstorm, my destination the all-year resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. My traveling stake was low, due to winterizing Deathmobile II with top-of-the-line snow tires, goose-down sleeping quilts and expensive insulation paneling, and my nearest bank cache was in central Colorado. Crossing from Illinois into Wisconsin, I looked at the big snowdrifts forming and knew they would be a long, deep freeze for whoever was unlucky enough to cross my path.

The decision made, I brainstormed with caution and preparedness. I thought of highway patrolmen prowling for stranded motorists to help, and of old Aspen killings and how difficult it was to strangle or bludgeon with legs mired in snow. Massive walls of bare spruce trees flanking both sides of the road caught my peripheral vision, and I imagined them as receptacles for bloody hollow points. The answer of shoot/rob/retrieve/bury came to me, and I pulled over and took my magnum from its undercarriage hiding place.

The snowfall got steadily worse, and toward noon I started wondering whether I should find lodging or park and wait the storm out. I was in the process of deciding when I saw a Cadillac erratically positioned on the left-hand side of the highway, nose out, the car in imminent danger of getting sideswiped.

I pulled over and tucked the .357 into the back of my pants, making sure my down jacket covered the butt. The highway was traffic-free, and I ran across it to the Cadillac.

There was no one inside, and I saw a faint trail of single snow-dusted footprints leading over to the right shoulder and northward. Stalking now, I returned to the Deathmobile and drove slowly ahead, one eye on the space cleared by my left wiper blade, the other on the roadside.

Half an hour later, I saw him, trudging in ankle-deep drifts. He turned around when he heard my motor, and something about the snow on his head made me reach for the Polaroid.

I tooted the horn and braked; the man waved frantically at his presumed rescuer. Setting the hand brake and hitting the blinkers, I squeezed out the passenger door to confront my victim.

He was middle-aged and portly, and his aura of affluence in distress undercut the lovely crown of snow he was wearing. Panting, he said, “My wife’s been after me to get a C.B., now I see why.” He pointed to my Polaroid. “Shutterbug, huh? I heard you guys would go anywhere for a picture, now I believe it.”

I pulled out my .357 and placed the silencered snout on the man’s nose. He said, “Hey, what the—” And I smiled and said, “All I want is your money.”

Shaking more from fear than from the cold, he said, “Money I got,” and I heard his teeth clicking. Motioning him toward the spruce trees some thirty feet away, I let him walk ahead; then, when he was ten feet from a solid bank of wood, I shot him twice in the back.

The silencer went pffft-thud; the fat man flew forward; splintering wood echoed. I set my stopwatch at eight minutes for ultra-caution, then counted to twenty slowly, to give my victim time to die. When I was sure he would not disturb me with reflex jerks or blood sprays, I grabbed him by the heels and dragged him over to the set of trees most likely to have caught the death rounds. Seeing the ends of the hollow points imbedded side by side in a young sapling, I pried them out with my fingers and put them in my jacket pocket, then hauled the man through an open tree space and over to a snowdrift already three feet deep. Covering my gloveless hands with my sleeves, I took his billfold from his inside jacket pocket, extracted a wad of hundreds, twenties and tens and a collection of credit cards. Stuffing them into my rear pants pockets, I stood back, deep-breathed and unhitched the Polaroid from my shoulder.

4:16 elapsed.

I inventoried my person, touching magnum, spent rounds, stolen cash and plastic. The footprints and blood were fait accomplis; fresh snow would cover them soon. Looking down at the dead man, I saw that his crown of snow gave him an air of the Romantic era, as if he were a fop in Beethoven’s time disguising his ugliness with a powdered wig. That thought jarred me, and I leaned over and snapped a close-up of the back of his head. The camera ejected blank paper, and when the snow-crown image came through, I put the picture in my front pocket, flipped the man over and snapped his eyes-bulging, mouth-bloodied death mask. My memory was blipped again, and with six minutes down I scooped snow over the corpse until it was a pristine white mound. Finishing the job, I studied the face shot on my way back to the Deathmobile.

With the .357 back in its safety compartment, I continued my journey, the photos on the dashboard where I could view them against the powdered-wig snow. I drove on slowly, hugging the right lane, imagining Mother Nature covering my tracks back at the death site. The storm was reaching blizzard proportions, and I knew Lake Geneva before nightfall was impossible — I would have to seek shelter soon. My wiper blades were barely able to dent the powder hitting the windshield; after turning into a long S-shaped bend, I had to get out and clear it by hand.

That was when I saw the roadblock.

It was sixty yards up, and I knew it couldn’t be for me — I had killed the fat man clean, an hour and a half earlier, and if I was identified as the killer, the police would have made a moving approach. Drawing myself drum-tight inside, I scrubbed the windshield clean with my sleeve, got back in the cab and tore the death pictures into pieces and dropped them into the snow outside my passenger door. Remembering the spent shells and credit cards in my pocket, I flung them out, then dropped the Deathmobile into gear and eased up to the barricade.

State troopers holding shotguns were lined up against the strung-together sawhorses, and there were a half-dozen blue-and-white cruisers behind them. As I braked, two cops approached the Deathmobile in a flanking motion, shotgun muzzles pointed straight at me. From behind the roadblock, an electrically amplified voice barked: “Man in the silver van! Open the door of your vehicle, get out with your hands above your head and walk to the middle of the pavement! Do it slow!”

I obeyed, very slowly, snow raining down on me, the two troopers continuing to hold their beads, the eyes of their 12-gauges huge and black against the snowfall. When I reached the middle of the asphalt, a third cop grabbed my arms from behind, drew them behind my back and handcuffed my wrists. Once I was immobilized, a swarm of troopers leaped over the sawhorses and descended on the Deathmobile, and the two shotgun cops lowered their weapons and approached. The handcuff cop frisked me from behind and said, “Clean,” and the other two pointed me to my van. Troopers were over, under and in Deathmobile II; it made me angry, and I sensed that indignant was the way to play my first hard interrogation since Eversall/Sifakis four years earlier. “What the fuck is this?” I said.

The shotgun cops pressed me into the side of my van, and leaned into it themselves. It gave all three of us a break from the wind and snow, and the older cop, who had a lieutenant’s bar pinned to the front of his Smokey the Bear hat, said, “Your name?”

“Martin Plunkett,” I said.

“Address?”

“I don’t have an address. I’m going to Lake Geneva to look for work.”

“What kind of work?”

I sighed angrily. “Lift operator or bartender in the winter, maybe caddy during the golf season.”

The other cop took over. “You a professional transient, Plunkey?”

“Call me by my correct name,” I said.

The lieutenant plucked my wallet from my back pocket and handed it to a trooper inside the Deathmobile’s cab. “Run him all-points,” he said. Turning to face me, he said, “Mr. Plunkett, you have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have legal counsel present during questioning. If you cannot afford counsel, an attorney will be appointed to you free of charge.”

I breathed the pitch in. In the background I could hear my name and driver’s-license stats being spoken into a radio mike, and the van shakedown looked to be just about over. The wise-guy cop said, “You got a statement to make, Plunkey?”

I sneered à la Bogart. “You suck cock, dick breath?” The trooper balled his fists, and the lieutenant grabbed me and led me a few yards away. I heard a voice yell, “Vehicle looks clean, Skipper!” and the lieutenant said, “Don’t affect an attitude, young man. It’s not the time or the place.”

I affected a hurt look. “I don’t like being rousted.”

“Rousted, eh? Been ‘rousted’ before?”

“I was arrested for burglary about ten years ago. I haven’t been in trouble since.”

The lieutenant smiled and brushed snow from his lips. “That’s the kind of story I like to hear, especially if it gets corroborated by the warrant check we’re running on you.”

“It will be.”

“I sincerely hope so, because three young ladies have been raped and murdered around here lately — one this morning back near the Illinois line — which is what this is all about. What type blood you got, Martin?”

I didn’t know how to react to the coincidence, and the shocked look on my face must have been convincing, because the lieutenant shook his head and said, “Ain’t that the worst possible? What’s your blood type, boy?”

“O negative,” I said.

“That’s mighty fine, and I tell you what we’re gonna do. First, assuming you haven’t got any outstanding warrants, you’re gonna drive your van to the next town, Huyserville, and you’re gonna hang out in a nice clean cell at the jail and get a blood test, and if it comes back O negative, you’re a free man, because we typed the rape-o sonuvabitch we’re looking for from his semen, and he’s O positive. Thank mom and dad for their genes, boy, ’cause any O positive stranger in my stretch of Southern Wisconsin is in for some rousting.”

A trooper stuck his head out the van’s driver’s window. “The sleds squeaky, and daddy-o’s got no wants or warrants. One burglary conviction back in ’69, that’s it.”

The lieutenant unlocked my handcuffs and removed them, then said, “Greer, you ride shotgun with Mr. Plunkett here to Huyserville, find him a cozy cell and get Doc Hirsh over to administer a blood test. Martin, you drive carefully, and resign yourself to a night in a hick burg, because these roads ain’t fit for man or beast. Now get going.”

I got in the Deathmobile and nodded at my copilot, who had his service revolver on his lap, his finger inside the trigger guard. The roadblock was pulled apart, and I accelerated into a blinding wall of snow. Concentrating on my driving kept me reasonably calm, but I felt cut down the middle: half of me proud of my performance; half of me frightened that the dead man’s Cadillac would be discovered while I was stuck in Huyserville — or that after I left and the corpse was found, my presence would be remembered and I would become a murder suspect. The fears seemed insoluble, futile to speculate on. I cleared my throat and said to the trooper, “Is there a hotel in Huyserville?”

He snickered. “Cockroach palace. If you have to stay overnight, stick to the jail. You’re a transient, right? Three hots and a cot’s all you guys want, and you get that at the slam — if you’re innocent and we let you go.”

I nodded. The trooper had an unpleasant conversational style, and I remained silent and let him fondle his gun. The storm was raging now, and it took me an hour to drive the ten miles to Huyserville, a town consisting of one business block and the Wisconsin State Police Substation where I was to be held. Pulling into the station lot, the trooper said, “Sure hope you ain’t guilty, pal. Two of the dead girls were from here.”

The station’s interior was spotless and surprisingly modern, and I was placed in a cell by myself. Only moments later, an old man carrying an archetypal black satchel showed up, and the cell door was racked by remote control. I rolled up my sleeve automatically, and the doctor removed swabs and a syringe with a plastic tube at the end from the bag. He said, “Make a fist,” and when I did, he swathed the crook of my right arm and inserted the needle. When blood filled the tube, he said, “An hour for the results.” and left me alone. When the cell door was racked shut, I got very frightened.

The doctor’s hour stretched interminably, as did my fear, which was not fear of being uncovered as a long-term mass murderer — but fear of being contained, not held in custody, but in the captivity of all the small moments of my past four years — the long, small moments not spent stalking, stealing, killing and thinking — but the time spent working at tedious jobs, cultivating invisibility, being cautious when I wanted to act boldly. The fear was that, inexplicably, these hick-town cops knew who I was, and knew further — inexplicably and preternaturally — that the most vicious way to punish me was to turn me loose, never to scheme/stalk/steal/kill again — my sentence a life made up of all the long, small in-between moments that used to allow me my freedom.

The hour stretched, and I knew that the sixty minutes had doubled and tripled, and that if I looked at my watch for corroboration I would lose every bit of my thirty-year cache of control. I thought of reaching for Shroud Shifter as a separate entity, and rejected the idea as naked regression; I began to fear that killing and holding in sex to the explosion point had somehow changed my blood type, and now I was going to be castrated for someone else’s crimes. The notion of foreign blood inside my own body brought me close to screaming, and I began cataloguing long, small in-between moments to prove to myself that I wasn’t going insane. I thought of every fleabag apartment I had lived in since leaving San Francisco; every stretch of desolate road where I never found anyone; every person I met who was too ugly, too poor, too well-connected and too uninteresting to kill. The litany had a salutary effect, and I looked at my watch and saw that it was 6:14 — my brain-tripping had eaten up over four hours. Then a voice outside the cell resounded softly. “Mr. Plunkett, I’m Sergeant Anderson.”

Before I could think, I blurted, “Was my blood all right?”

The voice said, “Red and healthy,” and the man it belonged to stepped into focus on the other side of the bars. My first impression was of looking at the most immaculate advertisement for authority I had ever seen. The man, clad in the Wisconsin State Police uniform of olive twill trousers, tan gabardine shirt and Sam Browne belt, was a perfect componentry of muscular litheness, bland good looks and something else that I couldn’t place. Standing up, I saw that he was just over six feet tall, and that his lank, reddish brown hair and toothbrush mustache gave him a youthful aura that his cold blue eyes played against — and lost. The exquisitely tailored uniform transformed his good looks into another something else I couldn’t decipher, and when we were face-to-face, with only the bars between us, it hit me. I was in the presence of an exceptionally powerful will. Regrouping, I said, “Red, healthy and O negative, right, Sergeant?”

The man smiled and patted a paper bag he was holding. “Right, O negative. I’m O positive myself, never made me more than a five-spot when I was broke in college.” Taking a key from his belt, he unlocked the door, and when I took a step forward, he blocked my path. For an instant the cold blue eyes fired up, then a lopsided grin nullified them, and Anderson said, “You ever notice how two people just getting acquainted talk about the weather, Martin?”

The softly enunciated “Martin” terrified me. I stepped back and said, “Yes.”

Anderson stroked the paper bag. “Well, we’ve got some real weather to talk about — twenty-six inches of snow expected by morning, tristate storm warning, roads closed within a five-hundred-mile radius. Look, I hope it wasn’t presumptuous, but Lieutenant Havermeyer got called up to Eau Claire, which makes me acting watch commander, and I took the liberty of booking you the very last available room in Huyserville.” He took a key from his back pocket and handed it to me, and when our fingers touched, I knew he knew.

“Martin? You feeling a little queasy?”

The soft, solicitous words went through me like a knife, and I started to weave on my feet. Anderson himself was a blur, but his hand on my shoulder was like a tree root holding me up, and his voice was perfect clarity. “Baaad weather. I was patrolling south of here this morning, saw this ’79 Caddy Eldo parked on the throughway, didn’t look nice, so I pushed it off the shoulder, probably covered with snow by now. Wonder what happened to the driver. He’ll probably end up in some timberwolf’s lunchbox, nice juicy humanburger. Don’t you want to know what’s in the bag?”

Shroud Shifter sent me flash-lines of asterisks, question marks and numbers, and when the numbers computed to 1948–1979, I tried to bring my hands up to Anderson’s throat. But I couldn’t; he was holding all two hundred and five strong pounds of me still with one firm hand on my shoulder and the admonishment, “Ssssh, ssssh, ssssh.”

Swaying underneath the trooper’s hand;

Adjusting to the rhythm and somehow liking it;

The cell about to tilt upside down, but saved at the last second by a choirboy voice: “I don’t think you can handle seeing it, so I’ll tell you. I’ve got a beautiful Colt Python with a pro-model suppressor, and some credit cards, and some of those True Detective magazines, and some ripped-up Polaroid photos, allll taped up and smeared with fingerprint powder, which reveals — you guessed it — two viable latents belonging to Martin Michael Plunkett, white male, D.O.B. 4/11/48, Los Angeles, California. Does it ever snow in California, Martin?”

The hand and voice let go, and my back hit the metal edge of the top bunk. The contact jarred me, and Anderson came into real focus — as an adversary. Straightening up, I began to sense the vaguest outlines of the game he was playing. I could still feel his hand and voice, but I was able to shake off their residual warmth and say, “What do you—”

I stopped when my voice came out an imitation of Anderson’s, softness wrapped in menace. Anderson smiled and said, “The sincerest form of flattery, so thanks. What do I want? I don’t know, you’re the Hollywood boy, you write the scenario.”

I made my voice grating — all hard baritone edges. “Suppose I walk out of here, get my van and just go?”

“Suppose you do? You’re free to. You won’t get far, though. That is a killer storm out there.”

“Do I get my—”

Anderson shook the paper bag. “No, you don’t. Don’t ask me again.”

The game’s outlines cleared a little more. It was coming down to a holding action. “What are you going to do with the things in that bag?”

“Keep them.”

“Why?”

“Because I like your style.”

“And when the storm cl—”

Anderson turned, his voice grating. “Clears, you’re free to go.”

I fingered the key in my pocket. Anderson said, “The hotel’s directly across the street and two doors down, and the Wisconsin State Police is picking up the tab because we inconvenienced an innocent man.”

I walked out of the cell and through the station and into the snow. It enveloped me, arid crossing to the hotel I saw my van parked at the curb, gone from silver to powdery white. I thought of heading into the storm, the Deathmobile as a vehicle of suicide; I thought of driving flat out, but cautious, moving. Panic was coming on, naked and ugly and picayune — and then I remembered how Anderson’s hand felt on my shoulder, and I knew that if I ran, he would never know that I was just as dangerous as he was.

Staying was the only way out.

I ran to the hotel, and got to the dilapidated coffee shop just as it was about to close. Ravenous, I ordered roast beef, hot rolls and potatoes, and wolfed them down. Then I went into the lobby and sat in a big chair by the fireplace to get up some guts.

My hours of waiting passed quickly this time; my fear was not steeped in malaise — it was edgy, masculine — like what bullfighters must feel before entering the ring. At 10:00 I took out my key, saw 311 embossed on it, walked up to the room and unlocked the door.

An overhead light had been left on, and it illuminated a dreary 20’s-vintage room — threadbare carpet, big spongy bed, battered desk and dresser. The plainness forced me backward, not in, and I knew that what I had been expecting was a naked man. The wish image vanished after a second, and I stepped into the four-walled time warp and shut and bolted the door.

Wind rattled the ice-rimmed windows, and a nauseating blast of heat came in through the vents. There were no chairs, so I moved to the bed. I was about to position myself on it when I saw that the coverlet was already occupied.

Polaroid prints were spread on the white chenille, three rows of four color snapshots laid out evenly sc that they covered the whole bed. I bent to look at them, and saw vivisection progressions: four nude teenage girls — all brunette and pretty — intact in the top photographs, gradually dismembered as the pictures worked toward the footrail.

The vents shook with another heat blast, and I flailed with my eyes for a sink. Seeing one next to a connecting side door, I ran to it and vomited my meal. I was splashing cold water on my face when I heard a click and saw Anderson walk through the door.

Grabbing a towel from the rack beside the sink, I wiped my face. Anderson leaned into the wall sideways, accomplishing the pose with the grace of a gifted male model. It struck me then that every small moment of the man’s life was infused with eloquence. “Don’t tell me you didn’t already know,” he said.

I held down an urge to rip the pose to pieces with my hands. “I knew. Why?”

Anderson smoothed his mustache and gave me a grin that made him look a guileless seventeen. “Why? Because I knew. There’s a two-lane that parallels the throughway south to the Illinois line, and back near Beloit it’s elevated. I saw you check out the Cadillac, and I saw you cruise for the driver, and sweetie, I knew you didn’t have good deeds on your mind. I gave you a lead, then I tracked you by radar. When you stopped, I waited five minutes, then idled up to about six hundred yards in back of you and parked. I had my binoculars on your van, and I saw you put the magnum back in its hidey-hole. That’s when I knew I really liked your style.”

Nineteen sixty-nine took over 1979, and I thought, “Lock, load and fire.” I centered in on Anderson’s neck, and I almost had up the guts to do it when he smiled and said, “Bad idea, Martin.” Knowing it was full lips and a crinkling mustache that stopped me — not the warning — I made a full-body eye circuit, and something external forced me to say, “Dye your hair blond.”

Anderson snorted and pointed to the bed. “Blonds are for sissies. Brunettes are my meat.”

I saw a gilt-framed picture of my father and a nude woman, both of them wearing powder-white wigs. Shocked that I could still recall the man’s features, and fearful of where the picture frame was taking me, I shut down the image by thinking of my snow-haired victim seventy miles south. Anderson’s perfect stylishness was fixed directly in front of me, forcing me to keep my eyes open and constraining my brain work, and I finally got up the courage to fire, roundhousing a right hand at his perfect nose.

He slipped the punch perfectly, grabbing my wrist, twisting it behind my hack and holding me still with a firm arm around the chest. Enveloped by perfect strongness, a perfect voice eased my fear: “Whoa, sweetie, whoa. You’re bigger and stronger than me, but I’m trained. I don’t blame you for being mad, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. Here, I’ll prove it.”

Anderson’s grip loosened, and he turned me around so that I was facing him. The absence of pressure left me feeling hollow, and I concentrated on the trooper’s regrouping movements to cut the edge off the vacuum. His hands went to his front and back pockets and came out with wads of cash, and he said, “See? Your money. When I searched your van I saw that the glove compartment had been pried open. There was no money in your hidey-holes, and I knew a bright boy like you wouldn’t travel without a nice roll, so I figured one of Wisconsin State’s finest ripped you off. Since I know my fellow officers, I knew exactly who to look for. I let him off with a reprimand — more than you’re getting, and for a whole lot fucking less.”

I took the money and stuffed it into my pockets. “Why?”

Anderson smiled. “Because I like your style.”

“Then what do you want?”

“The Python and the suppressor, you know, mementos. Some conversation, the answers to a few questions.”

“Such as?”

“Such as ‘How many people have you killed?’ ”

I looked around the room, knowing there had to be a catch, that, the cracked vase on the dresser had to be a listening device, or the curtain-covered window a sighting point for snipers with x-ray scopes on their rifles — hick-town killers who would fire on me at my first admission of murder. After a moment I knew I was thinking Shroud Shifter childishly, and I turned my gaze back to Anderson, roaming the tight contours of his uniform for concealed recorders. The trooper laughed at this, and said, “I get the distinct impression that you’re looking for more than a body wire, but anyway, let me cool out your paranoia, okay? For starters, I’ll state that I am Sergeant Ross Anderson of the Wisconsin State Police, and also the killer referred to n the Milwaukee papers as the ‘Wisconsin Whipsaw.’ There. That make you feel better?”

It did, for despite his stylishness and aura of danger, I knew that he was not in my league in what mattered most to both of us. Getting a bold sense of having achieved parity with perfection, I said, “About forty. You?”

Anderson’s jaw dropped; I had eclipsed his perfection. “Jesus Christ. Five. You want to tell me about it?”

I remembered his words when I pleaded for my magnum. “No. Don’t ask me again.”

“Touché. Why?”

“Because they’re mine.”

Ross Anderson stretched and said, “Then I guess we’ve reached an impasse.” He moved to the bed and scooped up his death photos, and when he walked to the connecting door I was blocking his path. “Tell me about yours.”

Smiling, Anderson slipped the pictures into his shirt pockets, buttoning the flaps over them. Raising his eyebrows in a parody of a come-hither look, he moved back to the bed and sat on the edge of it. I looked around the room and saw that there were no chairs. Knowing that Ross had designed it that way, I played along and sat down beside him. With our eyes averted from each ether but our knees touching, he said, “No pun intended, but I’ve been dying to tell someone, someone special and safe, so I guess unilateral is better than nothing.

“When I was in my late teens I had a buddy, and we used to go pheasant hunting over near Prairie Du Chien. He was a doper and kind of a sleaze, but he let me call the shots, and he was up for just about anything. We spent a lot of time talking about the Nazis and the concentration camps, and he had a collection of daggers and arm bands. He actually took all that stuff seriously — the master race and the Jews and the commies, the whole shot. I was fascinated by it — but he believed in it.

“We were up near P.D. one day, right after Thanksgiving in ’70. Gunning for ringnecks with twelve-gauges, double-aught buck, which if you know wing shooting, is much too big a load for birds. You see, we weren’t sportsmen or game-cuisine lovers — we just liked to shoot things.

“It was about zero, and there were no other hunters around. We didn’t have a dog to flush the birds, and essentially we were just looking for something to do. We were carrying pumps instead of double-barreleds, so we were glad there was no one around — we were kids, and any real sportsmen would have been able to tell by our weapons that we weren’t serious hunters.

“About dusk we start heading back to the car, and this old fart materializes out of nowhere. Big old red-faced guy with a thousand-dollar Browning over and under, and about another grand in L.L. Bean threads on his back. He starts giving us shit about our guns, and didn’t we respect hunting traditions and where were our hunting licenses — and then — zap! I look at my buddy, we have this moment of telepathy and blow the old fart to kingdom come, blam blam blam blam blam — five rounds apiece — we vaporize the cocksucker.”

I stared at the wall and gripped the mattress with both hands; beside me I felt Ross breathe in short spurts. Finally he took a huge breath, and continued:

“Needless to say, we didn’t get made for the snuff, and we were both scared shitless until the job got pinned on these two niggers who held up a gun shop in Milwaukee and ripped off a half-dozen Mossberg pumps — the same model my buddy and I had. The jigs got convicted on circumstantial evidence, and my buddy and I went our separate ways, because we were afraid of what the two of us together meant.

“So five years pass, I put it out of my mind and join the W.S.F. I love being a trooper, I’m a cop now, above suspicion. To make things even better, my buddy moves to Chicago and gets married, out of place and out of mind, we haven’t seen each other since the day the splibs got sentenced to Life and we celebrated with two cases of beer and said au revoir. Everything is just peachy and I’m getting ready to ace the sergeant’s exam, and then blam blam blam blam blam!

“What happened was that buddy boy was back in Wisconsin, harvesting a weed crop outside of Beloit, living in a cheapo furnished room in Janesville. Friends of friends told me, so I went looking for him. I checked out his flop: pictures of Hitler on the walls, bags of weed all packaged up ready to go, hate literature on the dresser. Totally unacceptable. I found out he was taking I-5 to Lake Geneva every third day or so, to sell smoke to the vacationers there, and I got his vehicle stats from the Illinois D.M.V. That stretch of road was on my beat, I knew I’d see him sooner or later, and sweetie, I was prepared.

“The next day I’m parked, running radar checks, and buddy boy’s old junker cruises by. I hit my cherry lights and siren and pull him over, and he goes, ‘Hey, Ross!’ and I go ‘Hey, Billy!’ and we shoot the shit through the window for a few minutes, then I tell him I have to go back to the cruiser and check my two-way.

“Back at my blue-and-white I hyperventilate to sound panicky, then I call in a 415 — Armed Suspect, Officer Needs Help, I-5 north of exit sixteen. I go back to buddy boy’s car and shoot him twice in the face, then I take a Saturday Night Special from my pocket, wipe it and put it in his right hand, stick his arm out the window and pop off a shot with his index finger — blam! — out into the cabbage fields. When the other units arrive, I’m weeping because I had to kill my old buddy Billy Gretzler that I used to go pheasant hunting with. Naturally all the evidence backs me up, and the plainclothes troopers who investigate all officer-involved shootings check out Billy’s room and find Der Fuhrer and the weed and conclude that, all things considered, my retroactive birth control was justified. I had a rep for coolness before the shooting, but after it I got one for sensitivity. That Ross Anderson, boy. Killed an old buddy in the line of duty, it broke him up, but he kept on truckin’ and made sergeant anyway, Ross the Boss, what a guy.”

I took my hands from the mattress; they were numb from squeezing my way through Ross’s monologue. Wanting to distance myself from him, I moved down the bed so that physical contact was impossible, continuing to stare at the wall. The aftertaste of his story hit me in waves, a one-two-three punch of callowness, bravado and style. I knew something essential was missing, but I pushed thinking about it aside, and when Ross poked my arm and said, “Well?” I launched my own death travelogue.

But I didn’t talk about my killings themselves.

It was the long, small in-between moments that I spoke of; the law-abiding time that felt incriminating to my own heart; the self-imposed sentence of constant movement, different cities, renting hotel rooms and apartments to appear normal when sleeping in the Deathmobile would have sufficed; the dubious celebrity of being mentioned in detective magazines written for near-illiterates; tweaking the police with self-incriminating clues, a fifth-class substitute for Martin Plunkett in worldwide neon; being relegated to moronic alliterative titles like the “Richmond Ripper,” “Aspen Assassin” and “Vegas Vulture”; feeling the nightmares always there behind the thrills, emblazoned in the neon my name should be written in.

I stopped when the discourse started to feel like a giant genuflection to Ross Anderson’s male-model stylishness. Turning to look at him, I got an urge to maim his beauty, carve my name across his body for the world to see. He smiled then, and I realized the thrust of our respective powers — I emasculated with guns, knives and my hands; he was capable of doing it with a wink or a grin. The missing part of his story came to me, and I said, “What about the girls? The brunettes? You didn’t tell me about that.”

Ross shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. After snuffing Billy I realized how much I loved blood sport. I’ve always dug foxy young brunettes, and sport’s sport.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. The die was cast somewhere, and thinking about it bores me. Apples and oranges. You like blonds, I like brunettes; that guy they caught last year, the Pittsburgh Pistolwhipper, he liked redheads. Like they used to say back in the ’60’s, ‘Do your own thing.’ ”

I moved closer to Ross, my work shoes touched his spit-shined paratrooper’s boots. “Could you ch—”

Cutting me off with a wink, he said, “Could I change my M.O.? Sure. You want blonds, I’ll give you blonds. I’ve got a traveling assignment coming up. Check the eastern U.S. papers out, starting about a month from now.”

“What?”

Again the wink — a velvet glove that smothered all possible queries. “Enough said. Listen, Martin. This is really my room. I keep it for long shifts and snow-in’s. You can stay if you want, but there’s only the one bed.”

The look in Ross’s eyes told me he was talking comradeship and style, not standard meanings. I took off my shoes and lay down, and Ross unhooked his gun belt and wrapped it around the bedpost only inches from my head. He lay down beside me and flicked off the wall light and seemed to fall into sleep concurrent with the abrupt darkness. Exhaustion hit me, and as the most incredible day of my life flickered out, I got frightened and stroked the grips of the .38, drawing comfort from knowing I could murder the murderer lying next to me.

Thus reassured, I slept.

Sunlight and the sound of heavy machinery awakened me dreamless hours later. I immediately felt for Ross, found the other half of the bed empty and jumped up. I was moving toward the sink and a cold-water bracer when he walked through the connecting door, a small revolver in his hand.

I grabbed at the sink edge, thinking of betrayal, and Ross gave me his rakish teenager grin and flipped the gun so that it was butt out. Handing it to me, he said, “Smith and Wesson .38 Detective’s Special. Safe, serviceable weapon, very cold. You didn’t think I’d let you walk out of here unarmed, did you? Ross the Boss, what a guy.”

I flipped the cylinder open, saw that the gun was loaded and stuck it in my back pocket. I couldn’t say “Thank you” — it felt acquiescent — so I asked, “Are the roads clear?”

Ross said, “Being plowed now. You should be able to truck by noon.”

I stood there, thinking of the taped-together snapshots and my magnum, not knowing what to say or do. Seeming to read my mind, Ross said, “Your stuff is safe with me. I’ll never rat you off, but I may need you someday, and the evidence is insurance.”

I was reverberating with the implications of “need you” when Ross leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. I leaned into it and tasted wax on his mustache and bitter coffee on his tongue, and when he broke contact and about-faced through the door, I was flushed and hungry for more. I did not yet know that the kiss would push me and haunt me and hurt me and drive me for the next two and a half years of my life.