The Night Monster

CHAPTER 42

I have seen the dead more times than is healthy. One thing I’ve learned from the experience: The dead don’t talk, but they do scream.

Hinst and I sat on a concrete bench in the cool shade of the courtyard. Hinst smoked cigarettes until his pack was gone. Looking at his profile, I could tell that finding Grady’s body inside the drum would haunt him for a long time.

I had a general idea of what had happened the day Daybreak shut down. Lonnie had played sick. Bolger and an orderly tried to move him. Lonnie killed the orderly, and held Bolger against her will. Mouse put on a stolen orderly’s uniform. Then they forced Bolger to come with them, took her car and escaped, never to be seen again.

“His name was Grady York,” Hinst said after awhile. “We used to go out for beers. He’d been over in ‘Nam, too. I talked to him the morning the place was shutting down. He agreed to meet me after work for a cold one. When he didn’t show, I figured he’d just blown me off. You know how it is.”

“Sure,” I said.

Hinst scratched Buster’s head. My dog had parked himself at Hinst’s feet, and was leaning against his leg, like he knew how much Hinst was suffering and wanted to comfort him.

“I need to find Lonnie and Mouse,” I said. “Is there anything else that you remember about them? Anything at all?”

Hinst gave it some thought. I listened to the wind whistle through the empty buildings. It didn’t sound like any wind I’d ever heard before.

“Come to mention it, yeah,” Hinst said. “Mouse used to bum smokes off the guards. We talked a few times. I think he knew that I knew he wasn’t crazy. He kind of got off on that, you know?”

“Like you were a co-conspirator,” I said.

“Yeah. Mouse told me something once that stuck in my head. He said that if he ever got out of Daybreak, he was going back home. I said something like, ‘Why go home? The police will just arrest you.’ And Mouse smiled and said, ‘The police don’t arrest people where I’m from.’ That always struck me as odd, you know?”

“Did he mention the name of the town?”

“No. But he was definitely from Florida.”

“How do you know that?”

“Mouse called himself a cracker. Only Floridians do that.”

“I need to call the police. They’re going to ask you a lot of questions.”

Hinst blew the smoke out his lungs. He dipped his head, and started to weep. It was an anguished sound, filled with the remorse that comes from wishing you’d acted differently than you had. Finally, it subsided, and he rubbed his face with his sleeve.

“Grady was my buddy,” he whispered.

“I know he was,” I said.

A cruiser showed up, and the uniform took our statements. Officer Riski again. Riski cracked a joke, and said that wherever I went a dead body usually followed. Riski was trying to be funny, only there was nothing funny about finding a dead man stuffed into a drum.

I sat in my car and tried to shake the images from my head. A couple of songs on the radio didn’t help. Nor the AC blasting in my face. Buster lay on the passenger seat, and I pulled his head into my lap, and buried my face in the soft fur of his neck.

After a while I started to feel better. Not a lot, but enough to chase away the dark clouds circling around me. Deciding to take advantage of my weakened state, Buster rolled over on his back. I obliged him with a tummy rub.

My cell phone beeped. I went into voice mail and retrieved the message. It was from Tony Valentine, the casino consultant whom I’d helped nab the gang of cheaters at the Hard Rock. Valentine had sent a text message along with an attachment. I read the message first. It said, “Is this the guy you’re looking for?”

Valentine had impressed me as a smart guy, and not someone who’d waste my time. I opened the attachment. It was a mug shot of a white male with sandy brown hair and a loopy grin on his face. The photo wasn’t great, and I brought the phone a few inches from my face, staring for what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds.

Mouse.

I got so excited, I hit the horn with my fist. Across the courtyard, Officer Riski jumped a few inches in the air. I rolled down my window.

“Sorry. My mistake.”

Riski shot me a dirty look and resumed questioning Hinst, who still sat on the concrete bench. I rolled the window back up, and called Valentine.

“Grift Sense,” Valentine answered.

“This is Jack Carpenter. You got him.”

“Good. I owed you one.”

“Tell me how you found him.”

“All it took was a phone call to Chief Black Cloud at the Hard Rock. The Native American casinos keep a national database of people who cause trouble in their casinos. They call the database American Eagle. Most of the people on it are card counters and cheaters, but there’s also plenty of scum.

“Something told me this guy you were chasing had done this before. So I asked Chief Black Cloud if he’d take the guy’s photo off the Hard Rock’s surveillance tape, and run it through the American Eagle database.”

“And a match came up.”

“You bet. His name is Andrew Lee Carr, nicknamed Mouse. He got backroomed at the Hard Rock’s Tampa casino three years ago. A coed from the University of South Florida claimed Mouse was following her around the casino, and trying to film her. Security pulled him off the floor and questioned him. Carr claimed the girl had flirted with him, and that he hadn’t broken any laws. They eventually let him go.”

“The casino didn’t call the police?”

“Unfortunately not. I also ran a background check on Carr. He was arrested in 1985 for robbing two convenience stores in central Florida and shooting the cashiers at point-blank range in the face. One of the cashiers died. Carr was eventually caught, and charged with first-degree manslaughter. His defense attorney convinced the judge that he was insane. He helped his cause by smearing his own feces on the defense table during the jury selection at his trial.”

“That’s a new one,” I said.

“Tell me about it. The judge sent him to a mental institution called Daybreak. I tried to get some information on the place, but there was nothing out there.”

I leaned back in my seat and took a deep breath. My wife was fond of saying that everything in this world happened for a reason. There had been a reason why I’d met Tony Valentine, and now I knew what it was.

“You just made my day,” I said. “Let me ask you something. Did the report mention Mouse’s hometown?”

“Hold on, let me take a look.”

Valentine put me on hold. I rolled down my windows, and let the hot air invade my car. Every tired bone in my body felt refreshed. I’d found the bastard.

Valentine came back on the line. “Your friend is from a small Florida town called Chatham. I just looked it up on my computer. Chatham is about ten miles north of St. John’s River, in the central part of the state.”

Mouse had boasted to Ray Hinst that the police in his hometown wouldn’t arrest him. What better place for Mouse and Lonnie to hide than Chatham?

James Swain

The Night Monster