Sam Storm sat four tables away from the stage and brooded. Damn the woman. How dare she? How could she? How did she?
Everything had been going along just fine. She had been doing exactly what he’d wanted, but when the time had come to kill her, she’d made him do what she’d wanted. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. Ever since that day in the convenience store, he had been in control of his destiny, right up till three days ago.
Now he was tormented with confusion. New York had been easy. Tonight would be easy, but something had happened and that woman was responsible.
The next time he would tie her, blindfold her and make her suffer.
He felt the knife under his jacket and a hot glow coursed through him.
He could be whatever he wanted. Do whatever he wanted. After he rid himself of Rick Gordon. But before Gordon died, he would know that everyone he loved had been destroyed. Gordon would suffer before Storm captured him and skinned him alive.
That was his task, make Gordon and all his bootlegger friends pay for the humiliation he’d suffered all these years. Nobody made a fool out of Sam Storm and stayed alive.
And he owed it all to the knife. The knife gave him the strength. No longer was he hampered by liberal laws. He was Sam Storm and he would stamp out the bootleggers. And then, when free of those that had shamed him so often, he could finally rest.
He pulled his thoughts back to the task at hand and watched the man on stage, who he planned on killing before the evening was over. He was tall, gangly, bearded and in the middle of an Irish folk ballad, his fingers running up and down the neck of the guitar like a tape on fast forward.
Like with the one in New York, he had no set plan for killing Danny Morrow. He would wing it, but he was beginning to soften toward Danny, the Dylan collector. He liked Irish music and Danny Morrow played it well.
He had been drinking draft beer in the Bourbon Street Irish Pub for the last three sets, clapping and stomping with the music, enjoying himself as he hadn’t done since college. He luxuriated in Danny’s New Orleans brand of Irish folk humor and was laughing and clapping at the end of a bawdy joke, when he noticed Danny signaling the audience to silence with raised hands.
“ Ladies and gents, I have to leave early tonight.” He was interrupted by shouts of “No,” “Stay,” and, “More,” but he kept his hand raised till the audience quieted. “Sorry, but I’ve got a date with a river tomorrow in West Texas. We do, however, have what I think is a pretty fair replacement for you tonight. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Susan O’Malley.”
Storm gasped as a stunning blond ascended the stage with an electric violin in her right hand. She was wearing an A shaped, white muslin skirt that fell halfway between her knees and the floor, allowing a hint of shapely legs, but what really tore at Storm’s eyes were the twin globes of her rising breasts, reflecting the stage light as the moon does sunlight. She was both girl-like and woman-like in her peasant Spanish blouse. Her bare shoulders and creamy skin stole the looks of every man in the audience.
He was so taken with her that he didn’t notice the man he’d come to kill leave the stage, nor did he feel Danny Morrow brush past him as he made his way through the crowd on his way to the exit.
Storm, captivated by the girl’s Southern beauty, sat through four sets, applauding each song like a teenage lover. He wanted the night to never end, but at the end of the fourth set another band took the stage and his heart growled in protest. He jacked his head round the pub, but she was nowhere to be seen.
He paid his bill and left.
Once on the crowded walking street, he headed in the direction of the Sonesta Hotel. Bourbon Street was thronged with tourists, buskers and prostitutes, and flashing signs promising burlesque, boylesque, voodoo, female mudwrestling, tee shirt boutiques, bars and more bars.
He stopped at the crowded bar across from the Sonesta and looked in at all the people who seemed to be having a good time and he felt a pang. He didn’t want the good time he was having to end. It had been so long since he’d been able to enjoy himself. He fought through the haze of his memory and tried to recall an earlier time when Rick Gordon and bootleg records occupied only a fraction of his life. A part of him was tugging him toward his hotel, where his car waited in the underground parking garage, but another part dragged him into the bar.
He pushed his way to the bar and ordered a Hurricane, the tall red drink that every tourist seemed required to try at least once. The heavily alcohol-laced drink caused him to stretch his facial muscles and reminded him of the last time he had been in this city of fun and excitement. He had been young and handsome and his wife had been alive.
Hurricane lips, he thought, Louise had Hurricane lips, her lipstick matched the red of the drink he was holding. He smiled at the memory of her. She loved New Orleans and New Orleans was the last happy time for her. She went into labor two weeks after their return to California and died in childbirth. The baby, born dead, had been a girl.
He raised the drink and drained the glass. The drink itself was too sweet for his taste, but the soothing effect of the alcohol was welcome. He chewed on the ice while he waited for the bartender to notice his glass was empty.
Two drinks later he left the bar and crossed the walking street to the hotel. He pushed through the door into the lobby with a slight nod to the girls at the reception desk. He continued to the back of the lobby and the stairs down to the garage below, where his rental car was parked.
Ten minutes later he drove by the big corner house where Danny Morrow lived. He turned the corner and parked. The house looked unoccupied, but Morrow left the pub more than three hours ago, maybe he was asleep. Storm shut off the engine and got out of the car. The street was middle-of-the-night silent and Storm took care not to make any noise as he crossed it and lifted the latch to the back gate. He eased himself into the backyard and studied the turn of the century house and, for a fleeting second, thought about returning to the car and leaving town.
He banished any thoughts about turning back. He’d come to kill a man. The mission demanded it, so he wondered how he was going to get into the house. He tried the back door. It was locked. He checked the two windows that were accessible from the back porch and discovered that they were also locked. It was a big house, with a lot of windows. He started working around to the side and discovered a window with a broken pane on his fifth try. He reached his hand through the opening, unlocked it, raised it, and climbed into the house.
While his eyes were getting used to the dark, his nose told him that the house was a dusty, dusky kind of place. He knew Morrow lived alone and that he was reconditioning the house, bringing it into the twentieth century, but he had no idea the place would be covered with a decade’s worth of dust. When his eyes allowed limited sight, he saw paint peeling from the ceiling and walls and that the room was devoid of furniture.
He reached into his pocket, took out a disposable lighter and flicked it. The flame showed him the door across the room and he followed its lead to a hallway that lead into a kitchen. Through the dancing shadows he saw a fully appointed modern kitchen, complete with built in dishwasher, oven and oversized refrigerator. There was a note stuck on the refrigerator door with a Daffy Duck kitchen. He crossed the room and read it.
Susan
You’ll find plenty to eat in the fridge. I can be reached at 713-555-3487. See you in 5 days.
Love ya — Dan
He turned on the light. He was furious. He scanned the kitchen and found the phone. He grabbed it and dialed the number.
“ King’s Pride Inn,” a female voice with a German accent answered.
“ I’m trying to reach my son, he left this number.”
“ What’s your son’s name?”
“ Sam Storm,” he lied, giving the only name he could think of on the spur of the moment.
After a few moments the woman with the accent said, “Sorry he’s not registered, but maybe he’s staying with someone else, most of our rooms have two or more kids staying in them during the summer.”
“ Why?”
“ We’re one of the cheapest motels in town and we treat the river rats right.”
“ River rats?”
“ The kids who go tubing down the Comal River.”
“ Tubing, what is tubing?”
“ They sit in inner tubes, you know, those things they used to put inside of tires before they invented tubeless.” The woman had a smart mouth. She coughed, then continued. “They float down the river and drink beer all day long.”
“ Where are you located?” Storm had heard enough.
“ New Braunfels, near San Antonio.”
“ Thanks.” He hung up.
He stood for a moment in thought. Then he left the kitchen to explore the house. With the exception of the living room, all of the downstairs rooms, he counted ten, were empty. Upstairs only one of the six bedrooms was furnished, all the others had wallpaper or paint peeling off the walls, and the hardwood floors were in serious need of repair. Many of the upstairs window screens were torn or missing and the upstairs bathrooms, with the exception of the one off of the master bedroom, were not functioning. Danny Morrow had a long way to go to get his money back from this white elephant, he thought.
Irritated, because now he had to drive the rest of the night, he made his way down the stairs. Outside he heard a car door slam. Instinctively he knew it was the girl the note had been addressed to. He turned out the light and hastened out of the kitchen to the dark hallway, where he hid in the space under the stairs.
He was cramped, but from his darkened position he could see into the kitchen and he had a clear view of the back door. He waited silently, like in ambush. He heard footsteps on the back stairs, heard a key inserted into the lock, heard the door latch click and he saw the door open.
It was the girl from the Irish Pub, Susan. Of course, he should have made the connection earlier when he read the note. She was wearing the same white skirt, but she’d changed out of the peasant blouse that had revealed so much into one that had sleeves and buttoned up to the neck.
The girl went to the refrigerator, read the note, then opened the door. She took out a quart of chocolate milk and drank from the carton. After she finished it, she tossed the carton in a waste basket. Storm readied himself for the attack, but before he moved, she turned round again, closed the refrigerator and started in his direction. He looked at her pouting lips as she approached his hiding point, and he clenched his fists, biting into his tongue. Her lips were the color of a New Orleans Hurricane. She had Hurricane lips.
She came into the dark hallway and stopped, inches from his crouching form, searching for the light switch. Her skirt brushed against his face. He could kill her so easily, but he didn’t. He held his breath, hoping she wouldn’t look down and see him, a coward below the stairs.
She found the switch and the hallway burst into light, allowing Storm to take in every weave of the cotton fabric. He started to reach for her, but something held him back. She had Hurricane lips. Louise had Hurricane lips. In the bar, behind the stage light, her lips were lighter, but now he knew they were Hurricane red, that special red that till now he had only seen on his wife. He was powerless.
She moved away and mounted the stairs. He remained until she reached the top, then he allowed himself a breath. He waited till she went into the one furnished room up there and imagined that she was using the working bathroom, probably to take a shower.
When he thought she was safely out of earshot, he eased his cramped body out from under the stairs and silently made his way to the kitchen. He opened the door with a burglar’s soft touch and made his way out of the house.
He crossed the street, a man torn in half, and slid behind the wheel. The fire inside him raged, he wanted to go back to his room and sleep, but forces beyond his control were driving him on. He reached under the seat for the road atlas and turned on the map light.
New Braunfels was about thirty miles north of San Antonio. He lay back, closed his eyes and asked himself if driving all night to kill a man he didn’t know was what he wanted to do.
Danny Morrow had done nothing to him. In fact, he told himself, if Gordon and his gang hadn’t set up their underground network, he wouldn’t have had a job for the last fifteen years. It wasn’t their fault that they were too smart to get caught in the act. It wasn’t their fault that the crime they were committing wasn’t felonious enough to keep the police interested. It wasn’t their fault that collectors all over the country clamored for the bootlegs. And it wasn’t their fault that everybody in the record industry laughed at him behind his back.
But he hated being laughed at. He started the car and drove the night away and half the next day. He was tired and sleepy when he turned off the interstate, but he still managed to find the King’s Pride Inn in less than five minutes.
He stretched, yawned and stepped out of the cool air conditioned car into a hundred and three degree West Texas summer day, where breathing was the only thing one had to do to work up a sweat.
He undid the top buttons of his sport shirt and wiped the sweat from his brow. He felt lousy. He hadn’t slept in over twenty hours. He hated the heat and he was beginning to question his actions. He was no longer sure he was fighting the good fight, but gritting his teeth, he made his way to the lobby.
He pushed open the glass door and again entered air conditioned comfort. And with the cold, the rightness of what he had done and what he was going to do flooded through him. The death of Gordon’s gang of four, followed by the death of Gordon himself would send a shock wave throughout the international bootleg community. Fear of finding themselves in the same shoes would send the other bootleggers scurrying for cover. Then, when the world was free of these record and CD pirates, he would finally be able to rest.
“ Can I help you?” He recognized the accent from the phone last night.
“ I’m dead dog tired and I need a room,” Storm said, putting on a smile.
“ Usually we’re booked for the summer, but we had a cancellation yesterday, so you’re in luck. One hundred and twenty a night.” The woman was older than God and her face was covered in rouge.
Storm dropped six twenties on the counter and jumped back when a large cockroach scurried over the bills.
“ Will I be sharing the room with his relatives?”
“ This isn’t the Hilton.” The rouge-faced woman scooped up his money, without asking for ID and handed him a key. “Room twelve, down the hall.” She didn’t ask why he had no bags, but said instead, “You’ll need a bathing suit if you want to go down the river.”
“ Where can I get one?”
“ Sporting goods store across the street.”
Storm thanked her and made his way to his room. The air conditioner didn’t work and he suspected that was the reason for the cancellation. He opened the sliding door and stepped out onto a fenced patio. The room next door had a makeshift clothes line with wet towels and bathing suits hanging on it. He reached over and took a black suit that looked like it might fit.
He was about to slide the door shut and take a shower when he heard a young girl’s voice call out, “Hurry up, Danny.”
He went out on the patio and looked over the fence. A young redhead in a bikini that matched her green eyes was loading the biggest inner tube he’d ever seen on the back of a fully restored ’65 Impala convertible. Another girl was rolling a similar tube toward the car. She was blond, thin, and looked like she’d just stepped off the cover of Vogue. And then he saw Danny Morrow, with both arms wrapped around a tube.
“ Where’s Ronny?” the redhead asked.
“ Bathroom,” Morrow answered. “We’ll have to wait.”
Storm tore his clothes off, jumped into the stolen bathing suit, grabbed a tiny hotel towel and started for his car. But he tripped over a cooler in the hall, landing on the seedy carpet with several cold beers.
“ Hey,” a young man complained. He was carrying a dive tank to the room across the hall. The corridor was littered with his things, scuba gear, a giant inner tube, a suitcase and the spilled cooler.
“ Sorry.” Storm pushed himself from the floor.
“ Why don’t you watch where you’re going? You spilled my beer and ruined the ice.” The boy had an athletic body and an attitude.
“ I said I was sorry,” Storm repeated.
“ Yeah, well sorry doesn’t quite cut it, does it?”
“ Here, let me help you with this stuff.” Storm picked up the beer and put it back in the cooler. Then he carried the cooler into the boy’s room.
“ I can do it!” the boy said.
“ No, I spilled the ice, the least I can do is help you load this stuff into your room and buy you another bag.” He went back to the hallway, picked up the wetsuit and weight belt, carried them into the boy’s room and dropped them on one of the sagging beds. The boy followed with the suitcase. Storm closed the door after him, picked up the scuba tank and brought it down on the boy’s head
There wasn’t any blood.
And now Storm had an inner tube, too.
He had just finished stuffing the tube into the back seat and was getting into the car when Morrow’s friend joined the group. Either I’m a fast killer, he thought, or that boy’s a slow shitter.
Morrow started the convertible and put a tape in the cassette player. Storm heard Bob Dylan, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, belting out Positively Fourth Street and his blood ran hot. The son of a bitch was playing a bootleg cassette. The son of a bitch was going to die.
He followed them through the small town to a wooded campsite. He stayed behind as they entered the campground, entering only after they were parked and were unloading their car. He parked far enough away that he could watch without being noticed.
The park was full of college kids, waiting in line to jump into the water with their tubes. The slow current carried them down the river. Many of the kids had a smaller tube with a cooler full of beer tied on to the larger one they rode in. It was one giant party.
He saw two men with scuba gear slip into the river and he smiled, remembering the dead boy in the room across the hall. The snot nosed bastard had it coming. It wasn’t Storm’s fault. His attitude killed him.
“ Scuba diving?” Storm heard Danny Morrow say.
“ They go along the bottom and gather up beer cans,” his friend Ron said.
“ They get paid for that?”
“ No. Every summer guys into scuba go down the river and every now and then they pop up and scare the girls. They usually make one or two trips gathering up the cans.”
Storm hadn’t been under in years, but he still remembered how. It was like riding a bike.
He watched the group as they headed for the wooden landing and the river. Morrow’s friend dropped his tube into the water, then climbed down the ladder after it. The two women, younger, were more daring. They threw their tubes in and jumped after them, squealing as they hit the cold water. Morrow was the last in. He went down the ladder with his tube in hand. Storm watched as he slipped into the tube at the foot of the ladder-buttocks in the center, legs draped over one side of the giant donut and resting his back over the other without falling into the water.
“ Didn’t even get wet,” he said.
Storm watched them drift away with the current, then he followed Morrow’s example, climbing down the ladder one handed, with the tube in the other. At the last second he put the tube in the moving water and let go of the ladder aiming his buttocks for the tire’s center. He was a big man and he got wet as he splashed into his target and he enjoyed it.
He paddled against the current, so that the four young people slowly drifted away. Within a few minutes they floated around a bend up ahead and were out of sight. He had no desire to stay with them any longer. He only wanted to learn the way of the river.
Every other minute he was passed by a group of college kids, the smallest consisting of two people, a pair of young lovers, and the largest, a group of about fifteen boys and girls laughing and drinking beer. So early in the morning and so many people, he could imagine the zoo the river would become in an hour or so, when the sun burned off the early morning cloud cover.
He lay back in the tube and watched the clouds go by. Convinced there would be no opportunity to get at Danny Morrow on this trip, he decided to relax and enjoy and the ride.
He studied the backyards of the large shaded Southern homes that jutted up against the riverbank. Places where kids grew up sheltered from the violence of modern America. He watched children swinging from a tree rope into the river. Their laughter and squeals of delight stabbed at his heart and he cursed. There had been no happy home when he had been a child.
He spotted a small pool of still water where two men were fishing from a rubber raft. He paddled over to them.
“ Fishing any good?”
“ In the morning, but once the river fills up it’s slow going,” one of the fishermen said.
“ The water here always this still?”
“ Unless it rains. When the river is up, the current reaches the banks.”
Storm looked across the river and noticed that the man was right. The areas by the riverbank were relatively still.
“ Hey, mister, you going down the chute?” a young boy, about ten, floating by asked.
“ I guess so.”
“ You ever been down it before?”
“ No.” Storm waved to the fishermen and paddled back out into the current with the boy.
“ You’re gonna love it. You go real fast and your tube spins around and it shoots you into the river below the dam and you get all wet and everything.”
He wanted to reach out, grab the boy and shove him under the water till he turned blue, but he held himself in check.
“ Get ready,” the boy said.
Storm felt the current as it picked up speed. He looked ahead and saw that the river was dammed and that part of the running current was funneled down a man-made chute that appeared to be sucking in the shouting, yelling, happy tubers. They were having fun and so was he. He clutched onto his tube and followed the summer revelers into the chute.
The chute was a collaboration of man and nature, an unpredictable waterslide that whipped around the dam, depositing the tubers in a small lake below. The smooth flowing river, when compressed into the funnel, churned and foamed, spinning the tubes and spraying the riders. Children loved it. The college kids loved it. And Storm loved it.
He started paddling to shore the instant he shot out of the funnel. It had been years since he’d had this much fun. He reached the bank and trudged out of the water, carrying his tube behind. He spotted a lifeguard and asked. “How do I get back?”
“ The bus leaves from over there every fifteen minutes. It’s a free ride if you parked at the landing.”
Storm’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger to a group of people in wet bathing suits stuffing their oversized tubes into the back of a blue painted school bus.
“ That thing still runs?”
“ Since 1963.”
He slung his tube onto his shoulder and walked over to the bus. He handed the tube to a tanned youth who stuffed it into the back, then he got into line behind a group of young people. By the time he got on board there was standing room only, but he was still able to search out and find Morrow and his friends seated toward the back of the bus, near the tubes that were piled to the ceiling. They were involved in a conversation that had them all laughing.
Their laughter stiffened his resolve.
Back at the landing, he watched as Morrow’s group headed back for another ride down the river. When they were out of sight, he carried his tube to the car. The hot West Texas sun had him dry by the time he got the tube in the back.
He drove to the motel, stopped at the desk and asked the rouge-faced woman if she knew where he could get a strong bag. She sent him to the kitchen and the cook gave him a gunny sack. Then he went to the dead kid’s room, stuffed the scuba gear into the sack and hauled it out to his car. He sang along with the radio on his way back to the landing.
He made his way to the river landing with the gunny sack over his left shoulder and his right arm through the tube. Once in the water, he set the sack in his lap and floated down river. When he reached the pool where the fishermen were on his first run, he was pleased to see that they were gone. He paddled into the pool and continued on under the overhanging trees to the riverbank. He waded out of the river, squeezing between the copious bushes, where he concealed his tube and donned the scuba gear.
He lowered himself back into about two feet of water, hidden by tree and bush, and waited. Forty-five minutes later his patience was rewarded. He spied Morrow and his friends floating toward him. The two girls with their red and blond hair acting as beacons made them easy to single out. Like a shark, he lowered himself into the water.
Three separate groups of river runners passed him, unaware of the danger he represented. He swam out to the center of the river as the two girls grew closer. The blond passed three feet overhead and he thought of her cover-girl looks as he eyed her legs through the murky water. He let her float on by, waiting, a still predator set on his kill.
The redhead floated over next, kicking her feet and splashing water with her hands. Storm imagined her chewing on her hair and clowning around. Morrow’s friend Ronny floated over with his belly down, paddling furiously with his arms. Storm watched, worried that the boy might see him, since he was floating face down, but the boy was more interested in catching up with the girls than checking out what lay below.
Then came Danny Morrow, sitting in his tube, buttocks hanging down through the middle, arms and legs dangling over the sides. Here was a man without a care in the world, Storm thought, just floating down the river, watching the sky go by.
Storm swam under Morrow’s tube, coming to the surface behind him. He reached out of the water, clamping a strong right hand over Morrow’s mouth and with his left, he brought the Bowie knife up through the center of the tube, up between the young man’s legs, driving it point first into his belly. Then he dragged the head below the water and held it there, to make sure.
He held on to the body as it went through the dancing spasm of death and when it was still, he pulled the tube over to the calm water. He felt a slight twinge of guilt, but he shrugged it aside, and brought the knife around the dead man’s neck, pulling it through, severing the head.
Then he swam back to his hiding place, removing the weight belt, regulator and tank on the way, letting them drop to the bottom of the river. He left the mask and fins at the river’s edge, grabbed his tube and went back into the water, heading for the chute. He gave the tube with the headless body a slight shove as he passed.
He entered the current behind a gaggle of giggling girls from Texas A amp; M. He listened to their banter and smiled when the giggles turned to screams of delight and anticipation as they neared the chute.
He followed them into the churning water, holding fast to his tube as it spun in the spray. He came out of the chute paddling with the current, directing himself to the opposite bank. He dragged the tube out of the water and made his way to the blue bus. He shoved his tube into the back and climbed on board. He took his seat as the bus started and didn’t look back when the screaming began.