The Bleeding Season Read online

  I might have been able to make it through the exit had I kept running, but probably not. Either way, I was not destined to find out, because I came to an abrupt halt, and as the tall man tried to stop he practically ran right by me. I swung at him as hard as I could while he was still off balance. My fist connected with the side of his face, and as the impact reverberated through my hand and up into my arm and shoulder, he groggily staggered back and fell to the floor.

  In the blur of confusion Tooley rushed past, and seconds later, behind me I heard scrambling and heavy, urgent breathing, some shouting—Donald’s voice—then a grunt. I turned toward the scuffle. Donald swung awkwardly at the man but missed, and Tooley knocked him aside with two hard shots to the stomach and head. As Donald fell, Rick came to his aid and fired a three-punch combination that dropped the man.

  I moved to help him when someone hit me from behind. The blow landed between my shoulder blades with tremendous force, and I staggered forward. I spun in time to see that the tattooed man had regained his feet and was closing on me quickly. Struggling to maintain my balance, I threw a punch but he ducked away in time, raised a fist and hammered it across the side of my head.

  I knew he had connected directly with my temple because my equilibrium was suddenly off, and a tingling feeling spread across my eyes and jaw—like a yawn that wouldn’t stop. My vision blurred, cleared then blurred again before I realized I was toppling to the floor face-first. Before my chin slammed the dirty tiles, I broke my fall with my hands and did my best to roll through it.

  I scrambled to my feet, head still spinning a bit. The man laughed like a moron, and there was something so inhuman, so sick in his drug-glazed eyes, I hesitated for just a second. From the look on his face, I knew he had sensed my indecision and interpreted it as weakness. As he charged me again, I timed a punch, braced myself then threw it.

  He ran right into my fist. His head snapped back and he stumbled. There was no blood, just a puzzled expression, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. While he wobbled about on shaky legs, I stepped in to finish him, but Donald came out of nowhere and hit him with a wild, arcing punch.

  This time he went down. I rushed forward, straddled him and hit him again and again. He covered the back of his head with his hands and started to crawl away, mumbling something unintelligible as he went, but I kept punching him until he was no longer moving.

  I fell off of him, my hands slick with blood, most of it his. He was moaning and just barely conscious, his arms still folded across his head in a feeble attempt to protect it. On the floor next to him, near his face, a trickling stream of blood was beginning to pool.

  Still a bit disoriented, I watched Donald crouch and pick up the baseball bat the bartender had dropped. Over his shoulder, I saw Tooley and Rick circling each other like a pair of jungle cats. Due to the blood both were sporting, I knew neither had gained a clear advantage since Rick’s initial knockdown.

  Tooley lunged and Rick countered with a combination that put him down a second time. He coughed, spat blood then slowly began to rise, but Rick pounced again, raining fists down on him in rapid combinations that made sickening sounds as they connected with skin and bone. Bloodied about the eyes, nose and mouth, the man fell again.

  Rick stood at the ready, chest heaving. “Stay down, asshole.”

  The man grunted and began to rise yet again.

  I scrambled over to Donald and pulled the bat from his hands just as Tooley let out a defiant growl and stormed Rick in a frenzy of rage. “Rick!”

  He looked to me as I tossed the bat into the air. In one fluid motion he caught it and swung it down across the man’s shins.

  Tooley howled and crashed to the floor. Moaning, he rolled back and forth clutching his legs, knees pulled in to his chest.

  Rick and I stood staring at each other a moment, out of breath, dazed and oddly satisfied, if not thoroughly surprised.

  Donald had sunk to one knee, perhaps due to the blows he had sustained earlier. I reached down and helped him to his feet. “You all right?”

  “Oh, spectacular,” he groaned.

  Rick threw the bat aside and wiped a slow trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of these cretins show up.”

  We turned our backs on the fallen bodies, the blood and the muffled cries still coming from the backroom, and together, walked out of the bar.

  Still riding an adrenaline rush, I stepped into the street. No remnants of daylight remained. A hot summer day had become a hot summer evening, and everything was heightened, sharpened and more vivid than normal.

  It seemed apt that night had fallen. We’d glimpsed the wisdom of the spirits in this old city—however briefly—and after all that had happened, after all that was breathing down our necks, for now, we were better suited to the dark.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was still early summer. We were a few weeks away from tourist season, so the landscape had not yet changed. Though a handful of early bird summer residents had arrived and opened nearby cottages, most of Donald’s neighborhood remained in the tail end of its hibernation. We’d cleaned ourselves up, nursed our minor wounds then taken the short walk through a small section of woods behind Donald’s cottage to a bluff overlooking the ocean. The moon had turned burgundy, and was so full and bright that it didn’t look real in the otherwise clear sky. Despite its brilliance the powerful pulse of strobe lights swirling from the public beach below overshadowed it, even at this distance.

  The three of us stood in the sand and beginnings of tall grass along the dunes, watching the official vehicles that were still parked at haphazard angles along the beach. A tent had been constructed where the body itself had been discovered, and several temporary stadium-like lights had been set up, giving the small area an oddly surreal look, an artificial glowing oasis surrounded by darkness. Though it was several hundred yards away, we could make out policemen and various authorities still scouring and investigating the area. Beyond the barriers they had put up along the parking lot, a small crowd had gathered to watch the goings on. Since the body had been found hours before and was long gone from the scene, I wondered what the townsfolk were hoping to see. I watched the red and blue beams pan and play about Rick and Donald’s faces, and wondered the same thing about us.

  “I wonder if he came here,” Donald said. “The night he put that body there. I wonder if when he was done, after he’d buried that poor woman’s remains down there, beneath the sand, I wonder if he came here to see me. I wonder if he came and sat in my home and talked about nothing at all the way Bernard was so good at doing, the way he could do for hours. I wonder if he laughed to himself about it later. I wonder if he found it amusing.”

  Rick was holding a six-pack of beer held together by plastic rings. He pulled one can free and ran it against his forehead. “Lot of FBI guys down there. They must be turning over every grain of sand hoping to find something. The local politicians were already bitching on the news about how this is going to hurt the tourist season. You believe that shit? Even the poor folks who can’t afford a real Cape Cod vacation won’t be showing up here if they think a serial killer’s on the loose. Hell, they can go further toward or up Cape and be safe.”

  “Or so it would seem.” The lights painted Donald’s face. He looked so strange with a bit of dried blood along his slightly swollen lip. It didn’t suit him, the face of a fighter. “They can bring in the CIA and it won’t matter. They’re hunting a ghost.”

  “Bodies popping up out of the fucking ground and all they’re worried about are summer businesses being down,” Rick said.

  My hands were sore, my knuckles covered in several small cuts and gashes, but the bleeding had been minor and stopped on the ride back to Potter’s Cove. I looked down at them, flexed my fingers. “Let me get one of those beers.”

  Rick held the cans out, dangled them from his grip on the vacant ring of plastic. I reached out and plucked one loose. It
was cold and felt good in my hand. The heat was still high but a slight ocean wind made it somewhat tolerable. I opened the can and took a long swig. It could have been—should have been—a beautiful night.

  “We could’ve been killed tonight,” Donald said, and it was then that I realized we’d been speaking in hushed tones.

  “But we weren’t,” I answered.

  “We could have been.”

  “Yeah, but we weren’t.”

  Donald ran a hand through his hair, eyes trained on the beach below. “The bodies will keep turning up, and once they’ve reached the end of the road Bernard created, all of this will end. They’ll either never know who the killer was, or they’ll somehow discover it was Bernard. Regardless, he’s dead and gone, and there’ll be nothing anyone can do. After the news stories have been reported, the television shows have aired and the books have been written, this whole horrible business will end. It’ll just fade away quietly until it’s reduced to some vaguely heinous memory, a scar Potter’s Cove will always have to endure, but little else. It’ll be a Remember When bit, that’s all. And in the end, none of it will have meant a goddamn thing. It’s a storm, Alan, and I plan to sit and wait it out.” He turned to me, his face half concealed in darkness, half illuminated by the moon and alternating swaths of police lights. “And once it passes, I’ll get on with this semblance of a fucking life I have. It’s not much—God knows—but it’s all I’ve got. I’m out.”

  I killed the beer. “I’m sorry about tonight, I never should’ve—”

  “I’m out.”

  “Donald, you heard what that woman said tonight, you saw—you saw her hands.”

  Rick moved a few feet ahead of us toward the edge of the bluff and sunk down onto the seat of his pants, the beers balanced in his lap.

  “Yes,” Donald told me, “I heard what she said and I saw her hands.”

  “And you still want to just walk away?”

  “You’re flipping over rocks, Alan. Don’t be upset with me if I don’t want to roll around with the bugs slithering in the mud beneath them.” He nervously wiped a bead of sweat from his temple. “I’ve never been in a brawl in my life, and here I am pushing forty and suddenly I’m in some used tampon of a bar trying to avoid being killed by lowlife thugs who may or may not have known some prostitute Bernard was seeing. I’m listening to a woman either possessed or insane babbling about evil spirits and darkness and grave soil, her skin splitting and bleeding right in front of me like some cheap parlor trick only it’s real—it’s real because I saw it and felt it. But it’s still madness, Alan, and it’s only going to get worse. I want nothing more to do with any of it.”

  I tossed the empty can aside, in Rick’s direction, and squared off with Donald. “Sticking your head in the sand and hiding isn’t the answer.”

  “Call it whatever you’d like. I’m out.”

  “Donald, I—”

  “I’m sorry, Alan. I’m out.”

  I was hoping Rick might back me up but he was watching the beach or the water or the night sky and clearly had no intention of getting involved.

  Donald let a hand rest on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I need a cigarette and a drink. Beer’s not going to come anywhere near touching what I require this evening. I’ll be inside, you guys are welcome to join me.”

  I watched him turn and walk back along the path toward his cottage. The darkness and trees swallowed him within seconds.

  “He’s right, man,” Rick said from behind me.

  I moved over toward him and crouched down. He had opened another beer and was nearly finished with it. “You out too?” I asked.

  “It’s a miracle one of those assholes wasn’t packed, Alan.” He glanced at me and smiled, somewhat helplessly. His eyes were red and glassy. “I get into scuffles all the time, shit, it’s my fucking job, happens at the club on a regular basis. But it’s different there. It’s my turf, I’m in control, I know the situation, the score, and in most cases, the players. It’s a controlled setting. But in a place like tonight it’s different. You never know what you’re walking into.”

  I knelt into the sand, felt it shift and sink under my weight, then sat back on my heels. The faint sounds of a police radio echoed up along the dunes before escaping across the slow steady waves of the Atlantic. “You saved our asses back there.”

  Rick shrugged. “You’re gonna go look for that chick, aren’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re playing around with people who aren’t like us, man. These people don’t live in the same world we do. Shit, they’re just barely on the same planet. You go fucking around with that kind of crowd and all the shit they’re into and sooner or later you’re gonna find yourself in a situation. It’ll either get you killed or you’ll end up killing somebody else, and either way, Alan, you fucking lose.” He chugged some beer, belched. “I can’t be in situations like that, man, you understand? What if I’d killed that guy tonight? Oh, sorry, your honor, my dead friend and the motherfucking spirit world made me do it in self-defense. I can bring that fucking whale into court in a wheelbarrow and she can do her bleeding fingers trick. Yeah, that’ll work.”

  “This shit’s not funny, man.”

  “You see me laughing?” Rick shook his head to emphasize the point. “I’m not ever going back to prison. Not for anything. Not for anybody. What if somebody had gotten killed tonight?”

  “Rick, what if whatever’s out there wants us dead anyway?”

  A cooler breeze rustled the tall dune grass as if in answer, but it was chased by a swell of heat and continued on through the trees behind us, making the respite from humidity short-lived.

  “Then we’re probably gonna die,” he said. “Look, I’ll always be here if you need me—you know that—but I can’t keep chasing—”

  “You saw what happened in that backroom tonight.”

  He turned to me quickly, like he planned to snap at me, but instead looked away and drank his beer. After a while he said, “Let the dead lie, Alan.” Rick opened another beer, held it out for me. “Let the Devil have his Hell, and let Bernard and the rest of them rot there. Go find Toni and get her back. Whatever’s real or whatever isn’t, that’s the only world—the only life that matters.”

  I began to respond but thought better of it. I took the beer he was offering and replaced it with my hand. We shook for what seemed forever. When he finally let go he looked out at the water and quietly continued drinking. I wanted to tell him there wasn’t enough beer in the world to make all this go away, but stayed quiet and gazed down on the scene of the crime instead.

  Somewhere down there was that darkness beneath the dirt Mama had spoken of. Darkness you didn’t come back from because you had to be dead to be there.

  And not only was I on my way there, I knew now I’d be going alone.

  CHAPTER 24

  The prospect of returning to an empty apartment was less than thrilling, but I did it anyway. I checked the answering machine, hopeful to find something from Toni, but there were no messages. The refrigerator was nearly empty and the cupboards weren’t doing much better, so I called downstairs and caught the pizza parlor just before they closed. One of the kids who worked there ran me up a couple of plain slices and a Coke. I ate out on the steps and let the sounds of Saturday night in downtown Potter’s Cove distract me for a while. The apartment was beyond hot, and everywhere I looked I saw Toni. The place still smelled of her, of her cologne and gels and powders and lotions, and even though she had taken quite a few things with her traces remained, traces of us.

  By the time I’d finished eating and forced myself under a cold shower, it was nearly two in the morning. My back was sore, the side of my head where I’d been punched was throbbing and my hands still ached. Rather than think about how old and out of shape I felt at that moment, I did my best to enjoy the brief break from the humidity the cool water provided.

  I emerged to find that things had quieted the way things do in towns—even bi
g towns—after midnight. I stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the rumpled sheets for a while. I’d been unable to sleep in it since Toni left.

  I wrapped a towel around my waist, went into the den and settled down onto the couch, certain I’d be unable to sleep. Within minutes, I had slipped off.

  I awakened in the morning to the realization that I’d had the dream again. This time, in addition to Bernard and the strange people accompanying him, Mama Toots was there too, wiggling fat bloody fingers at me and grinning demonically with her grimy teeth.

  My body was stiff and sore, and although I had slept, I didn’t feel rested at all, and wondered if I’d ever be able to totally relax again. I rubbed my eyes, stood up and shuffled to the bathroom.

  While I dressed all I could think about was the bar and everything that had happened there. The events continued to replay in my mind despite my attempts to concentrate on other things, and I felt confronted by a strange fusion of satisfaction and anxiety.

  I dressed in a pair of jeans, sneakers and t-shirt, then went to the bedroom closet and pulled a large lockbox from the top shelf. It contained several holsters, my 9mm, a box of ammo and two clips. I checked the weapon over, laid it on the bed then turned to the holsters and selected one that attached to my belt. Grabbing a clip of ammo, I shut the box, locked it and returned it to the shelf.

  Because of my job I was licensed to carry a concealed firearm, but the only time I ever did was during periodic work details that required me to do so. I felt strange strapping on a gun outside of work, but I had no idea what might be waiting for me out there this time. Wading through the dark alone was bad enough; I didn’t intend to do it empty-handed as well.

  I secured the holster and gun to the back of my belt and pulled my t-shirt down over it. Studying myself in the mirror, I stretched the shirt out a bit until it hung looser and the bulge was less noticeable. Sweat had already formed across my forehead and down the back of my neck. It was a little after eight o’clock, so I knew if the humidity was already this high we were in for another scorcher. Strange to see a heat wave this early in the season, I thought. But then again, everything else had gone haywire, why not weather patterns too?