THE RIDE HOME WAS SILENT for the first half hour. I thought Little Freddie dozed off. His head rested against the window, away from me. Then, he rolled it over toward me.
“You want to tell me what that was all about?” he said.
“The puking?”
He tapped the passenger window with two knuckles. “No, dumbass. I get the puking. Why you put Banks down like that. I had some more work to do.”
“Bishop wanted the money and the method. We got both. Torturing him wasn’t part of the deal.”
“Maybe it wasn’t part of Bishop’s deal, but that’s how I work and you took that from me.”
I shifted in my seat. “I’ve got no problem putting someone down who deserves it, but I didn’t sign up for pliers and skinning knives. I’m no Sigmund Freud, but you got some dark shit going on in your noggin.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be sitting in on my jobs,” said Little Freddie.
I looked out the rear window to check my blind spot before changing lanes and caught a glimpse of Little Freddie’s duffle. “What’s with that duffle? Your own little torture kit?”
Little Freddie glanced back at the bag. “That’s for my girl.”
“Say again?” I said.
“My girl.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
Little Freddie tapped his knuckles on the passenger window again. Two taps. “Why’d you get into this business?” he said.
“I told you earlier, I needed the money. Don’t have a lot of options without a state PI license.”
“Right, the money. The lengths we go to are defined by our needs. You need money, maybe to support a family or something, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, money motivates you to do bad things, and you’re okay doing those bad things because you can rationalize it.”
“There’s nothing rational about what you did back there,” I said.
“My needs and motivations are just a little stronger than yours. For me, it’s not about the money. Truth is, I’d do this shit for free.”
“Then, what’s it about if not the money?” I said.
Little Freddie hesitated. I could see the strain on his face, like he was having an internal debate whether he should continue or keep his mouth shut, if he should let me through that velvet rope or not. He was on the edge and I had to push him.
“Come on. What is it?” I said.
More taps on the window. “It’s about taking something back from these people. From the pieces of shit like Banks, like Bishop and like everyone else who plays this game, who take and take from other people. It’s about filling a hole that someone opened up.”
“What hole?” I said.
Little Freddie laid his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. His shoulders slouched and eased into the passenger seat. His chest heaved forward, and it felt like he’d sucked all the air from inside the vehicle.
“My wife, Sarah, used to pick up our seven-year-old daughter from ballet class every Wednesday night,” he said. “Sarah would pick her up and then grab dinner at Wendy’s and bring it home. I’d spread out a big blanket, and we’d have a picnic right there on the living room floor. In the summer, sometimes we’d have our picnic on the front porch. Then, one day, they didn’t come home. I thought traffic maybe. Just running a little late. Then a half hour turns into an hour. Then two hours. Part of me wants to jump in the car and go look for them, but I don’t have a cell phone, and I’m afraid to leave the house and miss their call if they need help. My mind is bouncing around inside my skull, thinking of all the possibilities.
“After about three hours, there’s a knock at the door. It’s a uniformed officer and a plainclothes detective. They say they need to talk to me. That something’s happened. They tell me to sit down. I ask them what happened, where’s my wife and daughter, but I already know. They’re dead. And not accident dead, but murdered. I knew that from the detective. He was there to ask questions. He was there as part of an investigation. Had it been an accident, I’d have been talking with two uniformed police officers. But the detective, he gave it away.
“They tell me they found my wife and daughter in the woods along the road, about five miles from my house. Some guy driving by sees my wife’s car and calls it in because he notices one of the car windows is broken. The cops show up and search the scene and find my daughter and my wife in a ditch a few feet from the car.
“The detective starts asking me questions about my relationship with my wife. If we’re having any troubles, which we weren’t. I know he’s just doing his job. That he has to treat me as an initial suspect, given it’s my wife and kid who’re dead. I’m connected. I answer his questions and then press him for details on the scene. I come to find out that my wife had been beaten and raped. Her throat slit. God knows what my daughter saw that night. They died right there in that ditch. In a fucking roadside ditch. The cops investigated it but didn’t come up with anything. It’s still listed as an open case, but no one’s working it.”
I kept my eyes on the road, not wanting to make eye contact. “Any idea who did it?” I said.
“No. I was working with some pretty bad people at the time, but it never followed me home until that day. That’s the problem with this game—the shit-stains we deal with. They all know someone. You get to the wrong person and they’ll strike back at you, but you’ll never see it coming. It always comes from a different direction. Round and round it goes.
“Whoever did it likes to fuck with me, though. Every now and then, they send me a postcard with details, about how my wife screamed or about how my daughter called out for me, shit like that. I keep all the postcards in a shoebox in my closet.”
“What the fuck? Why don’t you turn that over to the police,” I said. “Maybe it’ll help them.”
“They’re not looking for anybody. It’s long cold now. You want something done right, you do it yourself. I’m keeping everything they send me because someday whoever is sending me this shit is going to slip up. Say the wrong thing or give me too much information. Give something away that’ll help me figure out who it is. Then I’m going to find them. What I did to Banks back there will be a fucking warm-up for these guys. It’ll make the national news when I get through with them. You’ll see it on TV and you’ll know I got them.
“Last year they sent me one of my daughter’s ballet slippers. It’s still got the scuff marks on it, from where they dragged her from the car.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s fucked up, that someone would do that.” I wanted to bury the gas pedal, drive to Brooke’s house, hug my daughter and not let go.
I glanced at the back seat. “But I still don’t get the duffle,” I said.
“When someone takes a part of you like that, all you see is red. All you want to do is fucking explode on the person who did it. You’ve got all this anger to get out, but you can’t because you don’t know what to do with it. So it builds up inside you, like a kettle on the stove. But there’s no spout, no whistle, so the pressure just builds and builds. That duffle and what’s inside it is my release. Every time I go after someone. Every time I look into someone’s eyes and start cutting or breaking or hitting, every time I slice that blade across someone’s skin and separate a piece of them, every time I get a little piece of my wife and daughter back. That duffle keeps me going, and it’ll keep me going until I find the people I need to find.”
I shifted in my seat, looked over my shoulder and caught the duffle again. I knew Little Freddie wasn’t right in the head, but I wished I hadn’t learned the backstory. Just knowing Little Freddie liked to torture people was sick enough, but knowing that he had a legitimate reason for doing it was something else.
TWO HOURS LATER I DROPPED off Little Freddie at his home on Orchard Avenue and took the long way home back to the marina. I pulled to a stop across from Brooke’s house. It was past one in the morning and the house was dark except for a dim glow from Becca’s room. Her moon-shaped nightlight. Becca was asleep in her bed, probably with the covers pulled up tight, cuddling her stuffed horse. I watched her window for a few minutes and then pulled away toward the marina and my own bed.
Comments (1)
See all