Part 48 (2/2)
”Why is he here of all places?”
”Had to go somewheres, didn't he? But he grew up only a few miles down the road. Might still have pals around to help him out while he waits for it all to blow over.”
”Two-oh-nine?”
”The room above the car.”
The door was closed, the window was curtained, the room looked dead. And inside was the man who had murdered Hailey Prouix.
”Cutlip almost confessed to everything on the stand today,” I told Skink while I stared up at the room. ”Killing Jesse Sterrett, his abuse of Hailey, even her murder. Almost.”
”Who'd he blame?” said Skink.
”He said the Sterrett boy asked for it and Hailey seduced him.”
”b.u.g.g.e.r all. We ought to tell Mr. Sterrett when we gets a chance.”
”I'll drive you back down if you want, let you meet up with your old pals Fire and Brimstone.”
”Maybe we'll call.”
”You know what his last words were before he finally took the Fifth and refused to answer anything more? He said, 'Whatever Bobo done, I had nothing to do with.'”
”Loyal b.a.s.t.a.r.d, isn't he?”
”How'd you ever get hooked up with him in the first place?”
”He found me,” said Skink. ”Hailey left him my name in case of trouble.”
”There are four cops with shotguns behind that fence. I want you to hold on here while I head up to Bobo's room. As soon as I get to the door, go over and tell everyone waiting on the other side where I am.”
”Are you sure you want to go alone? You don't want me along, or one of the cops?”
”I don't know how he'll react to a crowd, and I don't need anybody reading him his rights either. I see trouble, I see a gun, I'll disappear and let our cops shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d to bits. But right now it's better all around if it's just me that goes up. Tell those clowns in the uniforms that they can bring their cars into this lot and put on the lights and c.o.c.k their shotguns if they want. It won't hurt if Bobo sees them out there once I'm inside. But under no circ.u.mstances are they to rush the stairs and start firing. If they spook him, there's no figuring what he'll do. Can you manage all that?”
”I'll try.”
I patted Skink on the shoulder. ”You did great.”
”I always does great.”
I returned his gap-toothed smile. We had a moment, one of those touching no-touch male moments, a glance, a nod, an urge to hug stifled. Who would ever have expected that I'd have to stifle an urge to hug Skink? To strangle his ropy neck maybe, but not to hug him. We had our moment, and then I headed off for Bobo.
The stairs were outside the building, at the end opposite Bobo's room. I strode quickly through the lot and around the tiny fenced-in swimming pool to reach them. I must have looked a sight, a man in a blue suit hurrying across the asphalt, his gaze steady on a second-floor window as he moved, but I reached the steps without so much as a twitch of that curtain. Slowly I climbed, stepping softly so that my footfalls barely registered on the metal stairway, and then, carefully, my back to the brick, I made my way along the portico to the corner room.
I stooped down below the level of the peephole as I pa.s.sed the door to Room 209. His door. Something tickled my neck as I pa.s.sed it. I reached out a hand and brushed the door with my fingertips. It was hot, sizzling, as if there was a strange, evil fire raging inside.
Past the door, I squatted at the window. Between the curtain and the sill closest to the door was a slight opening. Carefully I placed an eye at the opening and gazed inside.
It was a small, filthy room. My view was tightly constricted, but still I could see the bed unmade, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers, emptied beer cans, the crumpled cellophane of cookie packs and potato chip bags. A flickering blue light filled the room with an uneven glow, a television light, but I heard no sound over the incessant roar of the highway. And strangely, even as I could see the action of the screen play on the scuffed block walls, there was something else, some other change in the light, as if something was moving, circling, spinning between the light source and the wall.
And then that thing moved, circled, spun into view, and my breath caught in my throat like flesh on barbed wire.
Bobo, ghostly thin, pale, in jeans but s.h.i.+rtless, one hand gripping the neck of a bottle, the other the b.u.t.t of a gun, his lank blond hair spinning around his face as he slowly danced in loose circles to a music I couldn't hear. Bobo. Circling 'round and 'round. Like a moth 'round a flame. Circling. But it wasn't the mere sight of him circling like a moth that caught my breath, or the sight of his gun either.
When I had seen him in Nevada, his hands and arms had been scratched and scabbed as if infested with colonies of vile insects, but now it was as if the infestation had moved in marauding armies beneath his skin to cover the whole of his body. The entirety of his arms, his shoulders, his neck, his back as far as could be reached with his nails, on all of it the skin was ripped and flayed, raw, the wounds open and wet, oozing, the blood and pus running in narrow streaks from wound to wound.
It was as if Bobo, for some reason, for some reason that I could very well imagine, Bobo was trying to tear himself apart.
There is always a moment of shock when we catch a raw glimpse of another's utter humanity. We don't want to see it, we don't want to gaze beyond the surface of this clerk, of that cop, of that acquaintance, of that murderer, we don't want to be confronted with the deeper truth. But when we are, when against all our best efforts it is pressed into our consciousness, it never fails to shock us or to change us. And the shock is even greater when in our arrogance we believed that our understanding had reached beyond the mysteries of the other's soul. Here, now, peering through that crack between the curtain and the sill, seeing the wet wounds of Dwayne Joseph Bohannon's self-flayed skin, his suppurating hair s.h.i.+rt of septic gouges, I received such a shock. He was a cruel tool, stupid and violent, someone who had found his level with Lawrence Cutlip, that was what I knew for sure before I climbed those motel stairs, and there was an undeniable truth in all of it. But having made that climb, I saw a side I had never before considered. All the failures of his life, the disappointments, the desertions, everything he ever wanted and had been refused, everything he had never wanted but had gotten stuffed down his throat, the boy he had been and the man he had become, the entire breadth of his sorrow was written there on his flesh as if in a script of blood. I read it all, and like some great biblical pa.s.sage it reached into my soul, and something changed, something changed, something dark went out of me.
I turned from the window. It was too much to bear, but the change had happened just that quickly.
The police cars were already in the parking lot, the officers crouched behind them, shotguns at the ready. Breger and Stone and Troy Jefferson were standing in a clot of law enforcement behind the crouching uniforms. And standing together, still farther behind, was my brain trust, Beth and Skink. And each of them, every one of them, was staring at me, wondering what the h.e.l.l I was doing up there. I had planned on retreating if I saw a gun, I had planned on running and letting it play out as I knew it would. There would be a knock, an order, a demand. There would a shot fired and then another and then a fusillade that would rip Dwayne Joseph Bohannon apart. He would be ripped apart and would disappear from the earth as surely as if he had fallen into one of Roylynn's black holes, another of Cutlip's victims. It would play out just like that, except I couldn't let it play out just like that anymore, not after the glimpse I had caught of that boy's inner torment. The inevitable gunplay at the end was not inevitable.
I glanced back at the force arrayed in the parking lot and then knocked on the door.
”Dwayne,” I said through the metal door, hot, I now knew, not from his evil but from the sun. I was standing in the gap between the window and the door, protected, I hoped, from anything fired from the room. ”It's Victor Carl. We met in Henderson. You ran me off the road, tried to kill me. We need to talk.”
No answer.
I knocked again. ”Dwayne. It's no use. The police are already here. But I can help. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I'm here to help you.”
I pressed myself against the wall and waited for the curtain to be pulled aside. It was.
A voice came m.u.f.fled from behind the door. ”I have a gun. Tell them I have a gun.”
”They have bazookas, Dwayne.”
”Really?”
”Let me in. I'm a lawyer. I can help you. I want to help you.”
There was a long moment when I heard nothing, nothing, before, slowly, the door opened a sliver and then a sliver more, until the chain was taut. Dwayne Joseph Bohannon stood in the doorway, the gun in his hand, his face in shadow, a dirty tee s.h.i.+rt, stained with his blood, hiding the most hideous of his wounds.
”Thank you,” I said.
He leaned forward. The light hit his face. I had to look away.
”Will you let me in?” I said.
”I don't know what to do.”
”Let me in and we'll figure it out together.”
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