Chapter One

 

Mickey McCord was past giving a good goddam. His old lady was messing around on him again, and he was going to fuck somebody up this time, no two ways about it. He knew who, and he knew where. The when was up to them.

Sandy worked a second job three nights a week at a posh little Italian place in Palm Beach. The restaurant closed at twelve, and there was always an hour afterwards for clean-up before anyone could leave. Mickey and their daughter were usually asleep by the time Sandy got home. Of late, she'd been slipping in an hour and sometimes two later than usual. Three in the morning, give or take. Before, she'd be home at one-twenty, one-thirty at the latest.

Mickey waited until two on one of those nights, Tuesday going to Wednesday. When she wasn't home by then, he called the all-night coffee shop where she sometimes stopped with the other girls. They were there. Sandy wasn't.

He locked the house and walked the two blocks over to Linus Davidson's office, a shabby stand-alone building on an empty half acre of pavement that had once been a used car lot. All it had left was the old sales office looking pretty neglected, and weeds growing through cracks in the pavement. Strings of burned out lights hung in long arcs around the edges, and it was very quiet.

Around behind the building, Davidson's red Caddy was parked next to the pre-cast concrete steps by the back door. Sandy's green Volkswagen nestled up under its wing like a puppy at the tit. Both cars were in deep shadow, but enough light came through a shaded window to show the colors well enough. Mickey settled into a shadowed corner by the trash cans to wait.

He had a lightweight aluminum baseball bat with him, a DeMarini Voodoo youth model with a minus thirteen length-to-weight ratio and perfect balance. He set it on the ground to one side and thought about the line Rowdy Roddy Piper used in that cheesy sci-fi movie when he carried a shotgun into a bank full of aliens and said he was there to chew gum and kick ass, and that he was all out of bubble gum. That was Mickey, too. He was all out of bubble gum.

Let's see. What was that woman's name in the movie? The co-star with red hair and those fabulous ice blue eyes. Meg something. Ford? Forrester? Shit. What was her name? Foster! That was it, Meg Foster. Gorgeous woman, and Christ, those eyes.

Traffic was thin on Broadway, which Davidson's building fronted on. In the silence between cars going by, Mickey could hear the low sounds of voices inside through the cheap glass in the office windows. It wasn't clear enough to tell what they were saying, but there was tension evident, a minor argument of some kind. Maybe Sandy was trying to back out at the last minute and Linus was pressing her. That's what it sounded like. Then there was a quiet period, and then a single cry.

Mickey cringed, hearing that. It was the sound that Sandy always made in the moment of penetration. He hated hearing that, knowing it was someone else driving that little wail out of her. And then he could hear the more urgent sounds and knew that it was lovemaking he was listening to. Sandy was a gasper, not a moaner, so it was mostly Linus making all the noise, the son of a bitch.

Squatting there in the darkness, Mickey gritted his teeth and wished they'd hurry up before he exploded. And because he'd left little Cindy asleep at home. He had the walkie talkie thing hooked up and the receiver in his pocket, but he hated leaving a three year old by herself, even for a minute. If he heard one peep out of her over the radio, he'd run home and be there before she could wonder where he was.

Eventually it quieted down again in Davidson's office, and then Mickey could hear Sandy crying and Linus making some kind of noise, maybe laughing. There were footsteps on the wooden floor, a door closing, and in a minute a toilet flushed. Pretty quick after that the back door opened a little, and then all the way.

Mickey picked up the baseball bat and drew himself in tighter behind the trash cans and smelled piss and old French fries and god knew what else. Sandy came out blowing her nose on a tissue. Davidson stepped out right behind her and pulled her around by one arm and kissed her, hard enough to bend her head back. Sandy let her arms hang limp at her sides. It looked like he was kissing a corpse.

"You'll be back," Linus said when he'd finished. He had a knowing kind of sneer in his voice. "Women like you always come back, Sandy. They can't help it."

"You are such a bastard," she said in a low, sad voice.

He laughed. "Good cunt like yours needs a real man, and I got enough of that for you and some to spare. And besides, you'll do what I tell you to, or you know what happens next."

"God, how I hate you," she said.

The smile winked off Davidson's face and he slapped her hard enough to knock her glasses off. She grunted with the impact and would have fallen if Davidson hadn't jerked her upright by the front of her dress. The buttons gave way with little pops and skittered on the ground. She pushed at him, twisting in his grip, and the dress came off her shoulder on the left side. Her bra looked very white in the odd light. Davidson grabbed one of her breasts, the left one, and squeezed hard. Sandy gasped.

"Go home, bitch," Davidson said in a heavy voice full of threat and danger. "Get on out of here before I give you some more of what you deserve. Go suck your old man's dick and wish it was mine."

His shoulder dipped a little, showing the force he was using on her breast. Sandy's knees sagged as he hurt her. Davidson laughed at that, letting her writhe in his grip long enough to understand that she would get loose when he let her, but not before. And then he pushed her away, hard. She staggered backward, caromed off the Caddy like a pool ball off a cushion and fell, wind milling her arms like a kid.

Davidson didn't offer to help as she got to her hands and knees and then stood up again. She was crying openly, and stumbled, trying to tug her skirt down and hold the bodice of her dress closed while scrambling away from him at the same time. She fell again, sobbing, and pulled herself up against the car.

Mickey clenched his teeth and held still while as his wife unlocked the door to her little Volkswagen and slumped behind the wheel. She had on her waitress dress, or what was left of it, the brown nylon one with the white collar and the short skirt. She always wore panty hose with it because the restaurant was bone chillingly cold. Mickey had seen enough to know that she didn't have the panty hose on anymore, and it about locked his diaphragm, because she didn't wear panties under panty hose, meaning she was naked under that little skirt.

She started the car and drove away, still crying, and wiping brusquely at her eyes so she could see where she was going. She didn't look around, and she didn't look back at Linus Davidson. He snorted through his nose and hawked one onto the pavement by his car, looking pleased with himself. Then he went back inside and closed the door.

Sandy's red framed glasses lay on the pavement inches from Mickey's foot. They were new, and he put them in his shirt pocket. Then he stood up and went to wait by the door, wondering if he was going to have to go in after the fucker. Before he could make up his mind, the light went out in the back window and Linus opened the door again and stepped all the way outside. He didn't see Mickey standing there to one side of the steps, and turned to put his key into the deadbolt to lock up.

There wasn't any hesitation to it. Mickey was already tight as a coiled spring, and he just unloaded an out-of-the-park swing with the bat, releasing all that tension at once. It caught Davidson mid-way between the hip and knee with a sound like an ax in a tree and within that solid whack of sound was the wet, muted crack as the femur broke. Linus grunted with the shock of it and the sudden blinding pain, he fell over sideways off the steps at Mickey's feet.

Before he quite got to the ground the bat came around again and whacked his shoulder so hard that it was going to be a long time before he jacked off right handed again. He crashed to the ground, bellowing with the new pain and with protest, trying to see what was happening and hold himself plus get his arms up for some kind of defense all at the same time. Only he couldn't get his scrunched up eyes to unlock, one arm had quit working, and his leg was broken. There wasn't much he could do.

Mickey never said a word, just went after him some more, smashing at whatever happened to be available. Maybe if Davidson hadn't hit her, he would have gone a little easier. Maybe if he'd left her the fuck alone in the first place they wouldn't be having this discussion at all. Maybe a lot of things.

He wasn't mad, just methodical, standing over the man and swinging the bat straight up and down like a man chopping wood. The bat made a hollow tonk of sound when it landed, but what followed wasn't hollow at all. It sounded like somebody doing just what Mickey was doing. Pounding meat. Eventually, Davidson quit struggling. Mickey stopped and bent over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

Davidson sounded bad, breathing shallow and raspy like a man having a heart attack. Or a bat attack. He was conscious, sort of, but probably wished he wasn't. Mickey resisted the impulse to spit in the fucker's face. Instead, he dug the wallet out of a back pocket and found a Smith & Wesson snubbie in a clip-on belt holster behind the right hip. He took them both, hefted the bat onto his shoulder and marched away, Paul Bunyan, headed home from the woods.