Urge to Kill

60

True to their MapQuest directions, Quinn and Pearl drove on successively narrow roads for over an hour. They stopped to buy gas at a two-pump combination service station and mini-market outside Mansard, where Pearl used a horrific restroom. Then they bought a couple of bottle Cokes from a machine and got back into the Lincoln to drive some more.

Mansard itself wasn’t much more than a few blinks on a loop off a state highway. Pearl leaned back in the passenger seat and watched about a dozen small, clapboard houses glide past. There were a few side streets where more houses might be located. She saw a green street sign and noticed that this stretch of the business loop, the main drag, had become Crescent Street. So named, she supposed, because it described a long, constant curve.

Quinn slowed the car to under twenty so they could take it all in. There was a seed and feed store, an auto parts shop, a hardware store, a small grocery store, a barbershop, the Crescent Diner, a boarded-up movie theater, and a white-frame and brick city hall, where Jane Ellen fielded phone calls. What looked like a World War II howitzer squatted next to a flagpole on the green space in front of city hall, elevated and aimed down the street as if to repel any invasion by the outside world.

Quinn’s Lincoln was the only vehicle moving. On the sidewalks were about half a dozen people, mostly men wearing work clothes, and a couple of young boys who gaped at the car as if they’d never seen such a sight.

Pearl had been unable to find an exact address for Dwayne Avis. Quinn pulled the car diagonally across the street to the curb, where a tall, skeletal old man in jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt was shuffling along at about half a mile per hour. He lowered the window.

“We’re looking for the Dwayne Avis farm,” Quinn said.

The man had scruffy gray hair pulled back in a ratty ponytail held with a rubber band. A faded tattoo of a nude woman twirling a hula hoop adorned his scrawny right arm. He smiled with a flash of gold tooth as he sidled toward the car and bent down so he could look Quinn in the eye.

“I know where that’s at,” he said in a low, whiskey voice.

“Might you share the information with us?”

“Nobody much goes there,” the old man said.

“We’re the exception.”

The man leaned lower and peered past Quinn at Pearl. A whiff of gin and perspiration made its way into the warming car. “You two are cops.”

“How’d you guess?”

“You didn’t ask me why nobody much goes to the Avis farm.”

“Being cops,” Quinn said, “we usually sooner or later get what we ask for.”

The gold-tinted smile widened. “Might as well make it sooner. You wanna visit Avis, you keep on the way you’re goin’ through town, then after about ten miles make a right turn on a dirt road dead-ends on the two-lane. Go left an’ follow that road to the first dirt road, make another left, an’ you’re on the farm. That’s Avis’s driveway.”

Quinn thanked him and started to close the window.

“You don’t have to worry about me phonin’ ahead an’ tellin’ Dwayne you’re on the way,” said the ponytailed man. “He probably wouldn’t answer the phone anyway, an’ tell you the truth, it don’t mean shit to me why you wanna see him.”

“I’ll take you at your word,” Quinn said.

“Don’t count on a friendly welcome,” the man said. He straightened up as if his back hurt and continued his slow, steady progress down the sidewalk.

“Me in ten years,” Quinn said.

“You assume a lot,” Pearl said.

The old man lifted a hand in a listless wave, but didn’t look back at them as they drove away.

It wasn’t much of a farm. The surrounding fields lay fallow except for near the back of the barn, where tomato vines wound their way up head-high wooden stakes. A small field of cornstalks off to the left appeared to be the only other crop. The rest of the farm was so neglected that the woods had taken over a large area of the fields. There were more trees near the ramshackle house and barn: a shade tree—looked like a maple—by the barn, and a huge willow whose graceful branches scraped the old house’s second floor. In the shade of the willow a deteriorated wooden porch glider that didn’t look safe to sit on had become the property of termites.

The house was sided with faded gray clapboard. The trim was dark green, but hadn’t been painted in a long time. Here and there bare wood peeked through. There was a wide plank porch across the front. The wooden steps were painted gray and were rotted enough to be dangerous.

Pearl looked closely at the barn where the dogs had been found hanging and gutted. It was a leaning structure of weathered wood with horizontal streaks of old red paint still holding on. Its twin wooden doors were closed, and made to stay that way with a large padlock. The hinges on the doors were old and dusted with surface rust but looked strong. There was no sign of any animals.

As soon as Quinn and Pearl had climbed out of the parked Lincoln and slammed the car doors shut, a man in tattered jeans and a red shirt with its long sleeves rolled up to his biceps opened the front door and stepped out into the shade of the porch’s sagging roof. He looked to be in his early fifties, had receded dark hair, and a hard, seamed face. Slung beneath his right arm was a double-barreled shotgun.

He stood casually observing Quinn and Pearl and said nothing.

“Dwayne Avis?” Quinn asked.

“Was when I woke up this mornin’.”

He’s going to be difficult. Quinn kept an eye on the shotgun.

Avis spread his feet wide and assumed an unyielding stance. His dark eyes were staring and unblinking, with a glint of arrogance in them.

“We’re police,” Pearl said. She’d had about enough of this backwoods bravado.

“State or local?”

“New York City.”

“You got no jurisdiction here.”

“We can get it in a hurry if we have to.”

Avis stepped down off the porch, carefully holding the shotgun pointed at the ground. “Then why don’t you hurry on away an’ do that? Meanwhile,” he said, raising the shotgun but aiming it off to the side, “get off my land.”

Pearl thought she’d never heard that except in movies or TV.

Quinn thought this was a man who used his temper mainly as a weapon, not really losing it but pretending, showing it off as he did the shotgun, letting interlopers know what could happen if they took him lightly. Contrary to how they were portrayed in books and movies, this sort of person was dangerous. Pretending could turn real in a second.

“We only want to talk to you,” Quinn said. “It’ll be easiest all around if you don’t make us have to leave and come back.”

“I know what you wanna talk about,” Avis said. “Them damn dogs. Well, I already been dealt with and consider that whole thing a closed matter. Dealin’ with me next time won’t be a pleasure. I swore that to myself.”

“This isn’t next time,” Quinn said.

“We’re not interested in dogs or anything related to them,” Pearl said.

Quinn tried a smile on Avis. “Anyway, I don’t even see any dogs around here.” Playing dumb.

Avis knew better than to aim the shotgun anywhere close to them, but he pointed it farther off to the side, raised it, and fired one of the barrels. The noise was deafening, and Quinn could swear he heard pellets rattle through the branches of the willow at the side of the house.

“Shit!” said Pearl, instinctively dropping into a crouch.

Quinn remained upright and calm. “We’re here as part of a murder investigation,” he said. “And you’re digging yourself a hole with that gun.”

“Murder investigation? ’Cause of dogs?”

“Forget the goddamned dogs,” Pearl said, straightening up, but not all the way. She seemed hyperalert. Her black eyes were fixed, unafraid and calculating, on Avis.

He seemed to see in her somebody maybe not so unlike himself. Somebody who might shoot him.

“Forget the dogs?” he said, showing her he was heeding her words.

“I’m a cat person,” Pearl said, her bleak and menacing glare still trained on Avis.

“Well, I never killed any kinda person, nor animal I was never gonna eat.”

Quinn swallowed a bad taste in his mouth and then very slowly removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. He read off a list of dates and times.

“I need to know where you were on those nights,” he said.

“I was here.”

“You remember all of them?”

“I don’t need to remember any of ’em. I’m always here. And no, I don’t have an alibi. I was alone. Didn’t plan on havin’ to prove I wasn’t someplace else.”

“You mind if we look in the barn?” Pearl asked.

“I do, but you will anyway sooner or later.”

Seemingly ignoring them altogether, he turned his back on them and strode to the barn. He drew a ring of keys from a pocket of his threadbare jeans and unlocked the padlock, then swung both creaking doors open wide.

Pearl and Quinn stepped into the barn along with Avis. It was cooler in there, and surprisingly spacious and clean. Along one wall were wooden stalls, all of them empty. The bare dirt floor didn’t look as if it had been disturbed. There was a strong animal smell in the barn, but no animals. There was no straw in any of the stalls or on the barn floor.

“Why no animals?” Pearl asked Avis.

“Too much trouble. Not enough profit.”

Quinn and Pearl let Avis lead them out of the barn, keeping him ahead so they could see the shotgun.

“You gonna take me in?” Avis asked.

“That was never our intention,” Quinn said.

Avis went with them, still slightly ahead and off to the side, as they walked over to the Lincoln and stood in the glaring sun. It was a hot place, Avis’s farm, despite the shade trees. The breeze coming off the fields was warm and dry and carried the grit of dust.

“You comin’ back?” Avis asked.

“Might,” Quinn said. “And if I do and see that shotgun again, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”

Avis showed a flicker of surprise, but not the slightest fear. He watched them without expression as they got into the car.

As they drove away, Quinn saw in the outside mirror that Avis continued to watch, unmoving, the shotgun’s twin barrels still pointed at the ground.

“I really think he’d shoot somebody,” Pearl said, when they were back on the dirt road leading to the state highway.

“If he had the chance,” Quinn said, “and knew it wouldn’t get complicated afterward.”

“Not a knife man, though,” Pearl said. “Maybe with dead dogs, but not with live people.”

“That’s the way I figure him, too, but he’s hard to read.”

“He obviously loves his gun. Penis substitute, maybe. Your friend Zoe could tell you. Guns or knives, those are the usual toys for boys. They tend to settle on one or the other.”

“Usual isn’t always,” Quinn said tersely.

Pearl said, “Well, duh!” and turned on the radio.

He studied the items laid out on the bed and began methodically packing them into the blue canvas bag. The steel hook and portable drill were heavy, but he didn’t want to take the risk of fastening the hook beforehand, as he had with Terri Gaddis. Terri had been of average intelligence at best, but Mitzi was sharp and observant. She might happen to look straight up while showering and see the hook set in her bathroom ceiling, or she might even notice its shadow and glance up at it out of curiosity.

She’d certainly be curious, like most intelligent people. She’d want to know what the hook was for and how it had gotten there. Or if it had always been there and she’d never noticed it.

He couldn’t risk her asking a visitor, or the building super. So the hook would be installed just before it was needed.

Soon Mitzi would understand it all, when she could do nothing about it.

He smiled. Mitzi was smart, all right. His smartest so far.

That made it all the better.