There was a message on the cell.
“Hey, this is Bert. Saw you and the colored guy with the silly hat at the auction barn, today, remember?” the message started, like maybe we wouldn’t remember him. “Give me a call, you got some money. I got something for you.”
I called his number.
Nothing.
I left a message.
I had missed his call by only a few minutes. Where the hell was he?
I finished drying off and crawled back into bed and picked up my book. I read only a page or two before I called him again.
Nothing.
I finally turned in and went to sleep, and in the middle of the night I woke up thinking about Bert’s call. There was no reason to suspect anything odd, anything foul. He had called and left a message, and I had called back and left one, and that was it, but I couldn’t get the paranoid feeling out of my head that something was wrong.
He hadn’t said anything particularly suspicious in his call, but I had detected a worried tone in his voice. Or had I? Maybe I was projecting.
I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but that didn’t work.
I turned on the light by the bed and tried to read some more, but my mind wouldn’t focus on the words. I got up and dressed and drove over to Camp Rapture and the address I had for Bert. It was about a forty-five-minute drive.
His place was off the main road and over a cattle guard, down a drive that was little more than a crease in a pasture. As I turned into the long drive, a car nearly sideswiped me, and was gone.
I couldn’t tell much about the car, but I thought it was some kind of SUV. All I had seen was lights, and the blur of a passing vehicle. It could have been any dark color.
I drove on cautiously, came to where he lived, which was a green-and-white trailer up on blocks in a little grown-up yard next to a creek on one side, an aluminum outbuilding with the door missing on the other side. I could see a lawn mower in there and what looked like an automobile engine up on sawhorses.
Bert’s trailer didn’t look as if it had been new when it was new. His pickup was in the yard. The closest house around, another mobile home up the road, wasn’t close at all. Maybe half a mile. It was a lonely kind of place.
I sat in my car for a moment, then reached over and opened the glove box and got my. 38 Super out of there, along with gloves and a little pocket flashlight. I mention it was a Super because if I don’t Leonard always says something like “They don’t actually make thirty-eights in automatic.” And I always think if they don’t, then why do they call it a. 38 with a word behind it? Shouldn’t he know I’m talking about a. 38 Super? Gun fanatics make my ass tired.
This was the sort of thing I thought about when I didn’t want to think about doing what I was about to do, because I knew it was stupid, more stupid than Leonard wanting me to say Super on the end of . 38. But it settled the nerves. I figured whoever was in the SUV was long gone, and if they were someone I should worry about, that worry was doing seventy-five miles an hour down a dark road. I hoped.
I looked back that way. No lights. No shapes in the dark. Just lots of empty pasture. I didn’t see any cows. Maybe Bert was planning to go into that business. Or maybe he had been in that business, but no more. Maybe he just liked cows, and that’s why he hung out at the auction barn.
I stepped out of the car, put the gun and flashlight in my coat pocket, and pulled on the gloves. I walked up to the front door. A cement block served as a footstep. I stepped up on it, tried to look through the little diamond-shaped glass on the door, but it was designed for looks, not use. It was opaque. It was certainly nice that a fine wood-and-aluminum rectangle like a mobile home had so much class about its door window. Inside, maybe there was a chandelier over a coffee table.
I knocked, lightly at first, and then more briskly. I went around the trailer to the back. There was a rickety, weathered porch there. I went up on it and knocked again. My knock echoed through the trailer and then the noise died like a ball that had quit bouncing. I walked around the trailer and tried to look in the windows, but all the curtains were drawn, and I had to stand on my tiptoes to look at them.
I could hear the air conditioner that poked out of the bedroom window humming, which, considering we were on the edge of winter, seemed unnecessary.
I went to the front door again, thought about trying to jimmy it, but couldn’t see any future in that, other than a visit to the Camp Rapture jail.
Then I thought, What the hell, and tried the doorknob.
It was unlocked.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I looked at the edge of the door frame, near the lock. The wood was cracked there. It was the kind of thing a professional could do in a second, and almost soundlessly. The hair on the back of my neck stood up like brush bristles.
I opened the door and hoped what I smelled was a rat in the wall, but I had smelled that before and I knew what it was. It wasn’t old death. It was the smell of fresh blood and excrement, the common result of violent death.
The thing to do was to call the police and not go inside. So I didn’t call them and went inside. That was my style. I put my right hand in my coat pocket to keep the gun warm, and used my other to flash the light around, but otherwise, I stayed where I was, sniffing that stink, half-expecting someone to pop out at me.
There was a very large and nice television in the front room, and it took up most of it. There was a painting of dogs on the wall playing poker. Someone had to have one. I spent more time admiring it than it deserved. The place was so small, living there might require acrobatics. I kept looking at that painting of the dogs playing poker in the light of my flash. Anything to keep me from going back there where the stench was coming from. The air conditioner hummed and it was cold enough to be uncomfortable.
Finally, I pulled my feet loose and started walking. There was a bedroom in the rear of the trailer, and the door to it was open. I went inside. I bounced the light around. It looked as if it had been hit by a small tornado. Drawers were emptied on the floor, on the bed. Under some of the stuff on the bed was a heap that seemed to be the source of the smell.
Since no vampires seemed to be lurking in the shadows, I put the gun in my pocket and took out my flash and turned it on, shined it on the bed. I took hold of the edge of the covers topping the heap and moved them.
A body was underneath, not sleeping. I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose, but it didn’t help much; that blood and excrement smell was stout. The body lay on its back and it was nude and dark and bloody. I moved the flash over it carefully.
It was, as I expected, Bert.
There was a hole in the forehead. The bedsheets behind the head were thick with dark, drying blood. In the beam of my light it looked as if the victim had leaked black wax. His hands were stretched out and held with rope. The rope had been pulled down on both sides of the bed and tied to the bed rail. His feet were tied off at the end of the bed in the same way.
I moved the beam down his bare chest, down to the groin. There was something there that looked like the remains of a penis, because it had been worked over with something sharp. You might call it a major circumcision.
A cockroach crawled out from under the body and scuttled over the sheet, proving Bert wasn’t much of a housekeeper or the killers had brought their own roaches. Between his legs, about calf level, there was a design drawn on the sheets in dried blood.
A devil’s head.