16
On the day Skinflick and I hit the Farm, I had the grocery kid pick me up at a gas station about ten miles north of there at two thirty in the afternoon. I got there at six in the morning to look for cops. When the kid arrived and stood by the payphone to wait for the call I’d told him was coming, I came up behind him and dropped my left elbow over his chest. Took hold of his chin. He went stiff.
“You’re fine,” I said. “Just relax. But don’t turn around, and don’t look at me. This is going exactly as it was supposed to.”
“Yes sir,” the kid said.
“I’m letting go of you now. Let’s walk to the truck.”
When we got to it, I was still just behind him. I said, “Keep the window down and set the odometer. Let me know when it’s at almost six miles.” Then I swung up into the bed and sat with my back to the glass and my feet against the boxes of groceries. I was wearing a “U MASS” baseball hat, a sweatshirt with the hood up, and a full-length cashmere overcoat. The idea was to look like a frat a*shole and be impossible to identify.
When we turned onto a dirt road and the kid called out that we were almost at the six-mile mark, I told him to slow the truck down, and Skinflick came out of the trees ahead of us. Skinflick was dressed like I was, but he didn’t look like a frat a*shole. He looked like a Jawa. He had covered up our stolen car pretty well, though, off in the brush by the side of the road.
I gave him a hand up into the truck, and we tucked into the left side of the bed, because we knew the security camera was going to be on the left. The road got progressively rougher. Skinflick’s body next to mine felt like a cashmere-covered duffel bag.
We reached the gate. You could hear the hum of the electrified fence. After a while a man’s voice said, “Yeah, who’s that?” through a loudspeaker. The voice had that nasal George Bush fake-cracker accent that resentful white men all over America now use.
The driver said, “It’s Mike. From Cost-Barn.”
“Lean out so’s I can see you.”
I guess Mike leaned out. An electric motor started, and the gate rolled noisily aside. When we drove through, I could see that the fence had rails of barbed wire, slanted inward.
The truck banged and fishtailed uphill for a while, then stopped. The kid came around and opened the fantail, doing his best not to look at us as he lifted out a box that had a bunch of large cans of food and bottles of detergent in it. He looked nervous, but not so nervous I was worried he would f*ck up.
The second he was out of sight I slid out the back of the truck to the ground, and Skinflick came down after me.
The face of the house was done in brown overlapping planks, like it was shingled. Four windows in front, one on either side of the doorway, and another two up top. To our left you could just see the green fiberglass shack at the side of the house that Locano’s plumbers had run the pipes into. The back of the truck was angled toward it to give us another couple feet of cover.
When the driver pushed the doorbell, I ran for the front of the house, putting my back against the wall beneath the corner window. Skinflick landed hard beside me just as the door opened up. I put a finger to my lips in annoyance, and he gave me an apologetic thumbs-up. When the kid disappeared inside, we dashed around the corner.
This was the part we knew would be bad. The side of the house had the same two-up, two-down window setup as the front, though the rear ground-floor window was covered by the shack. The entrance to the shack, meanwhile, faced the back yard. To go around to it we’d have to make ourselves visible from at least two windows and the back yard.
So instead we ran in a crouch along the side of the house. The feeling of being watched was intense, but I’d warned Skinflick not to look up or back. I already knew by then that people can see almost anything and convince themselves they didn’t, but that human faces tend to be undeniable. Half your visual cortex lights up when you see one. So we didn’t raise our faces, and we reached the shack not knowing whether we’d been spotted or not. I held two sheets of the fiberglass back wall apart just long enough for us to slip through.
Inside the shed everything looked green, because the ceiling was the same translucent fiberglass as the walls. The doorway facing the back yard was just a cutout with a blue tarp hung over it from the outside. As promised, the wall shared with the house had a low spigot coming out of it. There was a steel bucket with a hose and a nozzle gun, and a drain in the muddy ground.
I went and looked out through the tarp door. The back yard was about three hundred yards deep before it hit the barbed-wire fence. There were some picnic tables and a cement barbecue pit. I could just see the edge of another fiberglass hut. I wondered if that was the one the dead girl had been found in.
I tried not to wonder whether the dead girl had really existed, or whether she had, just somewhere else. The job was blind. I’d known that coming in, and there was no point to opening my eyes now. The best I could hope for was that some evidence showed up before the killing began.
The fantail of the truck slammed, and as the engine started we could hear a man’s voice speaking to the delivery kid in a tone that was casual enough for us to assume we hadn’t been seen.
That meant the dangerous part was probably over. Now the boring part—the twelve hours of waiting before we went through the hole in the wall and started shooting people—was about to begin. I went and sat down by the spigot, on the tails of my new cashmere coat.*
Skinflick stayed standing, pacing the walls, and after a while I started to feel a bit embarrassed. Like I had some office job that sounded glamorous but really wasn’t, and now my kid had come to visit and I had to show him how Daddy waits all day and night in the mud and then sneaks into people’s houses to shoot them in the head.
Then I started thinking about how it was that my life had turned out like this.
How there’d been a time when I used to read books, and had a pet squirrel.
“Pietro,” Skinflick whispered, jolting me. “I gotta take a piss.”
This was not entirely unexpected on a twelve-hour layover. But we’d only been there for five minutes.
“You couldn’t have pissed in the woods?” I said.
“I did piss in the woods.”
“So go,” I said.
Skinflick went over to the corner and unzipped. When the urine hit it, the fiberglass rattled like a steel drum. Skinflick stopped pissing.
He looked around. Let loose a few experimental drops into the mud just short of the wall. They made a splatting sound, and he stopped again. He started to look desperate.
“Get down low,” I whispered.
Skinflick tried various crouches and kneelings, and ultimately lay on his side in the mud, pissing toward the wall in a fanning motion.
It worried me. Skinflick was as immune to shame as anyone I knew, but even he had his limits. And the journey from shame to resentment is the shortest one there is.
But as Skinflick shook his dick, he just said, “F*ck. I hope the FBI can’t DNA-test for urine.”*
A moment later he said, “Holy shit. Look.”
I went over and looked. They were almost invisible in the greenish gloom, but there were footprints all over the mud floor. All over—even where I’d been sitting.
Adolescent-girl-sized footprints. From many different feet.
It wasn’t evidence, but at least it was creepy.
Then the front door opened, and a teenage boy’s voice yelled, “Dad—I’m letting the dogs back out!”
Given the slowness with which some things reveal themselves, it’s amazing how fast other things become clear. Like how, if someone has dogs but has to keep them inside when a plumber or the grocery guy is there, then those must be some pretty bad-assed dogs.
The feeling of surrealism, and passiveness, and fogged stupidity, lifted from me instantly. I had placed myself here. Now I had to survive.
I pulled my gun out of one pocket and my silencer out of the other, and heard loping sounds as I screwed them together. Two enormous, Doberman-shaped shadows appeared on the fiberglass wall.
I later found out they were something called “King Dobermans,” which you get by crossing a Doberman with a Great Dane, then backcrossing it until all that’s left of the Great Dane is the size. “F*ck,” I said at the time.
Like all sane people, I love dogs. A dog is a hell of a lot harder to make vicious than a human. And it was clear we’d have to kill them.
The dogs started sniffing along the base of the wall that Skinflick had just pissed against. Then one of them started to push against the fiberglass, and the other stood back and started to growl.
The front door of the house slammed. That meant that either whoever slammed it was now outside, and should be taken out as fast as possible, or else was inside, and maybe wouldn’t hear what was about to happen.
Either way, it was time to do something.
The dog that was standing back woofed. Prelude to a bark. I shot it twice in the head through the wall, flipping it backwards, then shot the nearer one twice in the chest. It went down squealing.
I quickly switched magazines, listening. The shots had been silenced, but all four of them had made a loud impact noise going through the fiberglass, and the walls of the shack were still rattling. The bullet holes had frayed edges, like cloth.
The front door of the house opened up again.
The same teenage-boy voice said, “Ebay? Xena?”
I started toward the tarp-covered doorway at the back of the shack.
“Ebay!” the voice screamed, much closer.
“I’ve got this one,” Skinflick said.
“No!” I hissed.
But Skinflick was already running toward the wall of the shack, with his gun in his hand.
“No!” I shouted.
It was action movie bullshit. Skinflick jumped, and hit the back wall of the shack high with one shoulder, parting two sheets of fiberglass outward far enough for him to see, and shoot, through the V-shaped gap. Then the wall recoiled, flinging him back into the middle of the shack.
In a movie, though, he wouldn’t have missed. Or forgotten to put his silencer on.
The gunshot sounded like a car crash. If you’re in the trunk. It rang in my ears as I swung through the tarp-covered doorway and around to the front of the shack, almost slipping in dog blood, just in time to see the door to the house slam shut.
“Did I get him?” Skinflick said, as he came up behind me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s back in the house.”
“Oh, shit. What should we do?”
Like his f*cking us like this was something I had planned for.
“Get moving,” I said.
And not into the back yard, either. With the exception of their drywalling, these guys knew their house a lot better than we ever would.
I ran back into the shack. Kicked in the wall around the spigot and stomped the painted cardboard to the ground.
The opening it left was ridiculously small. Eighteen inches diagonally, maybe. And that was after I bent the spigot out of the way.
I could barely compress my shoulders enough to squeeze, head first, into the hole. And when I did, I blocked out all the light. I grabbed onto some pipes in the darkness and used them to pull myself into the mold smell.
My face knocked over a bunch of half-filled plastic bottles, and the smell turned to chlorine and dish soap. I almost laughed. Then I pushed open the cabinet door and squirmed out from beneath the kitchen sink.
The light was blinding. There was a wide stove on one side of me and a butcher’s block on the other. I got to my feet quickly.
The butcher’s block was no yuppie accessory: it was gore-stained and had a giant meat grinder screwed to one end. Also, there were two women standing on the other side of it, staring at me.
One was about fifty, the other maybe half that age. Both of them had that look you get after every bone in your face has been broken at least once and then allowed to set without medical attention. Though the older one’s was worse.
They were armed, sort of. The older one held out a carving knife two-handed, and the younger one had a raised heavy iron grate from one of the stove burners. Both women looked terrified.
I kept my gun on the women and helped Skinflick to his feet as he came through the crawlway. “Careful,” I said to him. “We’ve got two bystanders. Don’t shoot them.”
When Skinflick saw them he swung his own gun up. “Bystanders?” he said. “One of them’s got a knife!”
“Put your silencer on,” I told him. To the women I said, “Where are all the girls?”
The younger one pointed to the floor. The older one scowled at her, then saw me noticing and stopped.
“In the basement?”
The younger one nodded.
“How many people in the house besides them?”
“Three,” she said, hoarsely.
“Including you two?”
“Three besides us.”
“Are you the police?” the older woman asked.
“Yes,” I told her.
The younger one said, “Thank God,” and started to cry.
“Time to go,” I said to Skinflick. To the women I said, “Both of you stay here. If you move, we will kill you.”
Not too police-like, but whatever. I backed into the carpeted hallway that led out of the kitchen, then turned and ran down it.
The hallway was claustrophobic, turning twice under shelves stuffed with crap like plaid sleeping bags and old board games. It smelled like cigarette smoke. Near the end there was a cork bulletin board with yellowing photographs of family vacations and, I think, people f*cking, though I didn’t stop to examine them.
The hallway opened into a cluttered foyer with the front door at one end. There were two additional doorways and a staircase leading up. The doorway on my right was just an arch, but the one on the left had an actual door, which was closed. Skinflick came up behind me.
I covered the open archway and the top of the stairs with my gun and backed toward the closed door. Pulled it open in a crouch.
Coat closet. Lots of rubber boots. I pushed it shut again.
Between the closet and the front door there was a painting of Jesus that seemed so incongruous I lifted it up. Controls for the intercom and the front gate.
I considered just running for it. Opening the gate from here and trying to make it to the woods on the other side of the fence.
But that was a lot of open ground to cover, and an obvious move. And whatever my odds were, Skinflick’s were half that. I motioned for him to come out of the hallway and follow me, and crossed to the open archway.
This led into the room at the right front corner of the house. We had crouched under its front-facing window when we’d first gotten out of the truck. Out the side-facing window you could see the shack. The room itself had a large-screen TV, a couch, a weight bench, and some shelves with plaques and trophies on them—most, apparently, for skateboarding. Above the couch there was a framed poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger from his bodybuilding days.
As I glanced at it, my peripheral vision caught motion out the side window, and I ducked and pulled Skinflick down with me.
It was a tall thin guy coming around the side of the shack toward the front of the house with the kind of fast cross-step you only learn in the military or from gun-maniac videos. He had an aluminum riot gun in his hands that he kept focused on the shack.
“Clear out back!” he yelled, by which he seemed to mean behind the shack.
His voice was weird. Also he was weirdly skinny, and his cheeks and forehead had the kind of acne you could see from twenty feet away.
Jesus, I thought. There was no way he was over fourteen.
I looked up just in time to knock Skinflick’s gun aside from where he was about to shoot through the glass above me.
“What the f*ck?” he whispered.
I yanked him down below the sill. “Don’t shoot without telling me, don’t shoot glass that’s right in front of my face, and if your target is talking to someone, wait till you can see that person. And don’t kill any children. Understand?”
Skinflick avoided my eyes, and I pushed him onto his back in disgust. “Just stay the f*ck down,” I said.
A man’s voice yelled, “Randy—get clear!” It sounded like the voice from the loudspeaker at the gate.
A machine-gun roar came right through the wall at us. Skinflick and I both covered our ears as much as we could without putting our guns down.
I rose just enough to look over the sill.
The shack was gone. Torn up islands of green fiberglass drifted toward the ground like leaves, and spun all the way into the front yard. It was like someone had just taken out the shack with a leaf blower.
I turned to the window at the front of the house. The kid with the shotgun was there, three feet away, in profile. If he had looked in he might have seen me. Instead he started walking back toward the spot where the shack had been.
Two other men came into sight from the back of the house and met him there.
One of the two was another teenager, but older—eighteen or nineteen. He had a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
The other man was a nasty-looking middle age, with a foam-front baseball hat and untinted aviator glasses. He was about five nine, with a lot of the kind of hard fat they don’t teach you about in med school, but which you see all the time on guys who like bar fights. He was carrying something that looked like a chain saw, only with a Gatling gun where the blade should have been. Smoke and steam pulsed off the whole length of it. I had never seen anything like it.*
The two men and the kid kicked through the shredded fiberglass, then the middle-aged one noticed the hole in the side of the house. “DON’T LOOK LIKE WE GOT EM,” he shouted. It occurred to me that none of the three were wearing ear protection.
It was clear that they were about to move closer to the side of the house, at which point we would have to lean out the window to shoot them.
Skinflick, on his knees next to me, said, “We have to shoot.”
He was right. I made a tactical decision. I said, “You take the fat one. I’ll shoot the kids.”
We opened fire, and the window collapsed in front of us.
What I was thinking when I divided up the targets was that I would shoot both sons in the leg—ideally in the lower leg—and that Pops was so fat even Skinflick couldn’t miss him.
The problem was that I kept missing. It’s not that easy to shoot someone in the leg. It took practically my whole clip to shoot the older Karcher son in the shin and blow the younger one’s foot off.
Meanwhile, Skinflick fired off his whole clip without hitting Karcher once. At which point Karcher turned the motor gun on us.
As I yanked Skinflick backwards, the roar lit up again. Entire chunks of the corner of the wall we’d been kneeling against just evaporated, like in one of those movies where a time traveler changes something in the future and things start to vanish in the present.
The air filled with plaster dust and shrapnel and it became impossible to see. Skinflick squirmed out of my hands and I lost sight of him. I crawled inward, away from the corner, then behind some fallen masonry. Only when I noticed I was coughing did I realize I could barely hear.
After an amount of time I couldn’t judge, a gust of November wind pumped through the house, and the air cleared. The front and side walls of the room were mostly daylight. Big chunks of the ceiling were missing, showing a bedroom up above and some pipes spraying water down the remains of one wall. I could see all the way across the foyer. The Jesus painting, and the controls behind it, were wreckage.
Karcher himself was standing near what was left of the foot of the stairs. Skinflick was on his back at Karcher’s feet.
Skinflick still had his gun, but the slide was blown back to show how empty it was.
“OH, YOU ARE IN SOME F*ckIN TROUBLE NOW, BOY,” Karcher screamed at him. Apparently his hearing was coming back a lot slower than mine was.
“I AM GONNA KILL YOU SLOW, THEN FEED YOU TO YOURSELF.”
Deliverance is The Godfather for crackers.
It occurred to me that Karcher didn’t realize there were two of us.
I took my time standing up, and shot him cleanly through the head.
The rest you’ve read about. You’ve probably seen reenactments of it on true-crime television.
The older Karcher son, Corey, whom I shot in the shin, bled to death. The younger one, Randy, I tourniqueted. He might have lived, except that when I went to get the car, Skinflick shot him in the head. Welcome to the mafia, Adam “Skinflick” Locano.
When we loaded the three bodies into the trunk, the women came out on the front lawn and watched us, the older one howling on her knees, the younger one just staring. Later that night the bodies got divided into a half-dozen children’s coffins by a tech in the Brooklyn ME’s Office who owed the mob from betting on the Oscars, for f*ck’s sake, and the six coffins were buried at Potter’s Field.
Before Skinflick and I left, I located as many of the Ukrainian girls as I could. There was one on the rack in Karcher’s “office,” who I couldn’t get to wake up, and who I would have taken with us if I’d thought we could get her to a hospital any faster than the cops would.*
There was a still-alive girl chained up in the upstairs bedroom of one of the sons—by pure luck not the room above the TV room. And there were a couple of dead ones hanging from chains in another shack.
The entrance to the storm cellar, where the rest of them were, was around back. It was the worst thing I smelled until I went to med school.
Skinflick and I stopped at the same payphone I’d used to meet up with the delivery kid, and I called the cops to tell them where to go and what to expect when they got there. Locano we called by cell phone. After we’d dropped the Karchers’ bodies off, we went home and took showers, and Skinflick got drunk and high and I went off to find Magdalena.
Skinflick and I had barely spoken to each other since the shooting began. We were both deeply shaken, but we also both knew that Skinflick’s decision to cap a wounded fourteen-year-old was enough to destroy our friendship, and would have been even on a day when nothing else went wrong.
And two weeks later I was arrested for the murder of Les Karcher’s two wives.